The Pearl River Delta has no shortage of industrial robots, but it lacks "people".

He found in the research and training process, industrial robotics talent demand gap is huge, and the average monthly salary of more than ten thousand is not difficult. For China's millions of skilled workers, this is a shining career, but "machine for man" behind the shortage of professionals, is still a problem.

As a national manufacturing province and an important global manufacturing base, Guangdong's demand for industrial robots is more urgent, so governments at all levels have introduced relevant policies to promote the development of the robotics industry.

Public data show that in 2017, Guangdong Province has 156 key enterprises in robot manufacturing, and the province's industrial robot production of 20,662 units, an increase of 50.2%, accounting for 16% of the national production, with a retention of about 80,000 units.

For example, in Dongguan City, from September 2014 to January 2017, enterprises declared a total of 2,698 "machine for man" special funding projects, with a total financial investment of about 38.6 billion yuan, new equipment and instruments 76,315 units, the number of projects and the amount of investment in Guangdong Province, the first.

However, "machine for man" there are limitations, in addition to policy support, capital investment, high-quality labor is very critical.

If there is a lack of experienced technical personnel with the ability to learn and create to engage in design, programming, installation, debugging, maintenance, repair and other work, "machine for man" will be difficult to achieve the desired results, capital substitution of labor will not pay for itself.

This means that the process of industrial upgrading from the "world factory" to "smart manufacturing" will inevitably require economic growth to shift from relying on the demographic dividend to relying on the human capital dividend.

Transformation is not easy, most of the enterprises in the industrial robot industry chain empathy.

Some application companies tried to recruit some engineers specifically to manage and maintain existing industrial robot production lines, but after two or three months, most of them chose to leave. They chose to jump to employment in integration enterprises, which not only pays more, but also allows them to learn the design and application methods of robots in various industries.

It can be said that no matter for the integration enterprise, or for the purchase and use of these industrial robots for the application of enterprises, professional engineers are scarce resources. There is even a joke in the industrial robot integration enterprise, called "buy a robot, send engineers".

Such a problem is being faced by an intelligent manufacturing integration company in Shunde, Guangdong, whose customers are mainly labor-intensive enterprises with assets of 1-1.5 billion yuan.

When the company sold some automated production line projects to application companies, it also had to send its own engineers to train the customer's technicians during the design and commissioning of the production line. Often, after the project was delivered, the customer's technicians did not learn or left the company after learning half of it.

Short-term training is difficult to see the effect is because the operation and maintenance of the equipment of the primary technology is not complex, but involves the programming of industrial robots, electrical and other specialized technology, must have a certain amount of pre-accumulation, but most of the manufacturing skills workers can not meet the standard.

This integration company could not get the engineers back, so there was a shortage of engineers for subsequent projects. Moreover, other customers continue to turn to integration firms for help in sending technicians.

Accordingly, the training of industrial robotics professionals has become an emerging industry.

This company is initially a Hangzhou-based industrial robotics system integration enterprise, in 2015 began to transform to do industrial robotics industry talent training, positioning itself as a middle and high-end technical skills talents, requiring participants to have college education and above, electromechanical related majors.

Most of the training instructors here have more than ten years of experience in the industry, in the actual project has accumulated some experience and resources, making the teaching closer to the real installation and commissioning site, and the equipment used in the training is also more in line with the mainstream of industry applications.

The training curriculum is divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced, starting with basic operational programming and introduction to automation components, followed by programmable logic controller (PLC) programming, then robot maintenance and repair, robot control system and offline programming, robot vision applications, robot welding applications (because the 50% robot does welding), and finally integration project debugging.

The idea of the whole training is to practice more on the operation of the single industrial robot, then the learning focuses on the installation and debugging of the robot workstation, and finally the installation and debugging of the whole production line.

As the Robotics Training Institute has jointly developed a certification system with many universities, integration companies and robotics companies, at the end of the training, the students need to take the exam, and those who pass the exam will be awarded the certificate of "Industrial Robotics Application Engineer (Debugging and Maintenance)".

This is a professional qualification certification system established by the industry on its own initiative and jointly recognized, and Huang Hong successfully got the certificate.

However, what is needed for companies are skilled workers who are experienced and able to start working immediately, because industrial robots are used in different product lines, different products have different requirements, and workers also need to adapt to the actual application scenarios in factories.

Training helps workers get started in the industrial robotics industry with systematic theoretical explanations and hands-on practice, but it only allows them to meet the basic requirements of the company's growth expectations for operators - to continue to gain project experience and achieve proficiency within six months or a year.

Specialized Talent Gap and High-End Manufacturing Iteration

Although the related training industry has emerged, due to the fact that industrial robots belong to the emerging field, specialization and high technical level requirements, the current labor market with industrial robot design and programming, installation and commissioning, repair and maintenance of industrial robots and other related experience and skills of professional and technical workers are still scarce.

A study pointed out that in 2015, China's installed capacity of industrial robots has reached about 260,000 units, but only 165 graduates of the industrial robotics program in higher education that year.

According to the development plan of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by 2020, the installed capacity of industrial robots will reach 1 million units, which will require roughly 200,000 practitioners related to the application of industrial robots, which shows that there is a huge demand for skilled workers in the industrial robotics industry.

From the supply side, the number of skilled workers being developed and trained falls far short of what is actually needed.

An engineer who has worked at a robotics supplier for ten years said in a media interview, "I explicitly tell my workers when I give them training that it's no problem to learn automation programming and earn over ten thousand dollars a month. This kind of talent is in short supply, and [companies are] basically poaching each other."

With the vigorous development of China's industrial robotics industry, in order to adapt to the new needs of industrial development on talent training, more and more middle and higher vocational colleges and universities, and even undergraduate began to open industrial robotics-related majors to cultivate applied and R & D talents.

In 2015, the catalog of higher vocational education programs of the Ministry of Education clarified the specialty of "industrial robotics".

In 2016, a total of 240 higher vocational colleges and universities across the country opened industrial robotics technology majors, while in Guangdong Province, there are now more than 30, and more schools will follow to open this specialty.

According to the estimation, if the higher vocational colleges and universities that offer industrial robotics majors keep the scale at 300, they will train 33,000 people every year, which can basically meet the market demand.

In order to cope with and solve the problem of training and development of technical and skilled personnel in the process of China's industrial upgrading, the Government has begun to pay attention to this issue.

In 2017, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the "Reform Program for the Construction of Industrial Workers in the New Period", which puts forward the requirements of "constructing a system for the formation of industrial workers' skills" and focusing on improving the skills quality of industrial workers, and emphasizes that rural migrant workers are a group that can't be ignored in cultivating the technical talent team, and that the formation and enhancement of their skills level has an invaluable role to play in The formation and upgrading of their skill level play an inestimable role in alleviating the skill shortage during the period of transformation and upgrading of China's industrial structure.

Thanks to its sound industrial sector and complete supply chain system, Made in China is an indispensable link in the global production network.