Industry 4.0 has changed the engineering education in 21st century? Know, How it has happened?

Preamble

In my last article, I was talking about the reason of downfall in engineering admissions through the demand and supply perspective. However, this demand and supply concept is applicable in each and every phenomenon of life. In today’s article I am going to through light on a very important question of the current time i.e. “Industry 4.0 is changing the engineering education in 2020”. Now, are you interested in knowing that how this change is going to take place?

Let’s try to find out the answers in the following paragraphs;

Engineering Education is changing – Why?

Now, the question arises that “why I am saying that engineering education is changing its shape”. becuase, if you are going to remember, there was a time, not much before but only around 15 – 20 years back, when a person dreaming to take admissions in engineering was having plenty of different choices in his mind about the streams of engineering like mechanical, civil, electronics, electrical, computer science, information technology etc. and he gets puzzled in choosing the right stream as the number of opportunities available in each of these streams were plenty enough.

Moreover, the number of admissions in different institutions in each of these branches were adequate enough and even the situations in most of the cases was like “no more admissions can be done as the seats have been filled already” On the other hand, if I will talk about today’s time, then there are still plenty of different choices available in the mind of every engineering dreamer, but he is not puzzled (as much as he was before) about making the choices. It means, while making the choices, his decision lies towards the computer science.

Why it is so? Are the number of opportunities available in each of the streams other than computer science not adequate enough?

Or he is not desirous to do work in streams other than computer science. But I think, this is not a good question to be answered because anyone’s desire to do something or not is also caused by several factors and among these factors one may be the opportunities are not adequately available in other streams i.e our previous question.

Now the question arises, why the opportunities are not adequately available in other streams such as mechanical, civil, electrical etc.? Your answer could be that this is just because of the changing nature of jobs………… now again, why the nature of jobs is changing? No, No, don’t guess much now. I am telling you the answer i.e. Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0

Now, this is the perfect time to answer the question “what is Industry 4.0”. Definition wise it may be defined as the fusion of several technologies, which is not only helping in automating the production, but also the knowledge. These changes are being possible with the development of enormous computing capacity to handle massive amounts of data, which in turn enable machine learning and the outcome of this is the development of cyber physical systems. “As the internet has changed the way humans interact with each other, the cyber physical systems will change the way humans interact with the world around them”.

The development of these cyber physical systems requires the development of several technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, internet of things, cybers security, cloud computing etc. Development of these technologies is helping each and every sector in automating their jobs. This can be briefly understood with the help of a survey conducted by aspiring minds and published as “future of jobs 2018”. In this survey, they have highlighted the automation potential of different job functions along with their respective demand in India, which has been shown below;

Facts & Figures

S. No.	Job Function	Demand	Automation Potential
1	Accounting	3%	61%
2	Analytics and consulting	4%	35%
3	Core engineering	7%	27%
4	Customer service	9%	64%
5	General management	7%	14%
6	Marketing	7%	21%
7	Operations management	1%	53%
8	Sales	12%	39%
9	Software and IT	31%	42%

Changing the engineering education through Industry 4.0

Through the above table and graph, two main conclusions can be drawn in case of engineering education;

1. The opportunities available in core engineering jobs are only 7% of the total opportunities, while the computer science domain (software & IT skills, analytics & consulting) is able to create 35% opportunities, which accounts for approx. one third of the total opportunities. However, analytics & consulting also requires management skills but we are counting it in computer science domain as it requires programming and coding skills to analyse the data.

2. The core engineering jobs are having 27% automation potential, while the software & IT skills possess 42% and analytics & consulting possess 35% automation potential.

I hope now the things are being pretty clear about the scenario of most of the student’s decision regarding computer science. As the core engineering sector is having less demand in the market, most of the student’s decision is lying in the favour of computer science, as it is creating much opportunities.

But, one question is still left that how the Industry 4.0 is changing the nature of jobs. Answer is by “automating the jobs”, simple. If we will look back at the data and graph, we are pretty clear that most of the jobs are having great automation potential being developed through technologies responsible for maintaining cyber physical systems.

Concluding Remarks

Now, as we are moving towards the conclusion, we also need to understand that what kind of automation through Industry 4.0 we are talking about. This can be understood by some simple examples like;

1. Replacement of manual efforts by robots in case of repetitive, hazardous tasks in industries.

2. Application of machine learning algorithms in data driven forecasting and strategic decisions.

3. Using internet of things to build and operate the smart appliances through your mobile phone.

4. Replacement of waiters, customer service agents etc. by robots in case of service sectors.

There are many more examples of automation through Industry 4.0 but all cannot be listed completely here.

So, What are your thoughts on the same? Share your views with us in the comment section. Also share it with your friends on the social media to spread the thoughts.

Thanks

Sources

1. N. W. Gleason, “Higher education in the era of the Industry 4.0”

2. “Future of jobs 2018”, Aspiring minds

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Disclaimer: The views presented in this article are the author’s own views. The views are presented here just for the purpose of information. These views are not meant to harm any one’s belief / thoughts.