Since the industrial revolution, factory owners have looked for ways to automate production – making the manufacture of their product more efficient. As industry changes and expands with new technology, the need for skilled and educated technicians who are able to maintain and fix robots and machines increases. The Automation Technology program will prepare you for a career working in a facility that relies on motors, robots, mechatronics, programmable controls, and electronic systems.
Many economists argue that automation bears much more blame than globalization for the decline of jobs in the region’s manufacturing sector and the gutting of its middle class. Indeed, in his farewell speech to thousands in a packed convention hall in Chicago, President Obama warned: “The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete.”