Apprenticeships to tackle robotics & engineering skills gap
Published: 20 December, 2022
Parents who despair about the number of hours their children spend glued to video games should take heart - today’s gamers are likely to be the robotic and vision engineers of tomorrow, says Scorpion Vision.
It’s no secret that the UK manufacturing industry is experiencing a massive skills shortage. Indeed, the latest ONS figures show that between August and September this year, the number of vacancies was over 67% higher than pre-pandemic levels.
All areas of manufacturing are struggling to attract new talent but in robotics and vision engineering, the situation is compounded by the post-pandemic boom the sector is experiencing. Demand for 3D machine vision systems has accelerated with the growing adoption of automation in a range of industries - a trend that, ironically, is being driven in part by the labour crisis.
If robotics and vision engineering is to keep pace with this demand and advance in terms of technology, the sector needs people who are capable of designing, building and programming robotic vision systems. Skills and innovation go hand in hand. But where is this next generation of talent going to come from?
Many parents today despair about the number of hours that their children spend in darkened rooms playing video games. What they don’t realise is that these ‘digital natives’ possess skills that will be extremely valuable in a workplace that is increasingly reliant on digital and virtual reality technology.
Digitalisation is redefining engineering as a practice. As digital technologies become more and more commonplace, engineers will need new skills to take full advantage of them. In other words, tomorrow’s engineers will need both traditional engineering skills and software engineering know-how, including knowledge of 3D modelling, AI and data science.
Apprenticeships and more flexible, non-traditional learning mechanisms will be crucial for fostering new talent and developing hobby gamers into highly skilled robotic and vision engineers.
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Alex Charles, a machine vision engineer at Scorpion Vision is a great example of how the apprenticeship pathway can be a win-win for businesses as well as employees Alex has learned how AI can be harnessed to enhance image processing and has accumulated lots of knowledge about optics, lenses, cameras and lighting - hardware as well as software.
