Who applies principles and practices of green engineering and green chemistry to process quality and innovation in lean manufacturing? Who performs as a key hybrid merging engineering with a commitment to holistic sustainability and stakeholder needs: eco-friendly quality, safety, reliability, and cost? The Sustainable Manufacturing Process Engineer originally designs, continuously improves and retrofits processes to conserve energy and natural resources, decrease hazards, improve safety and contribute to regenerative life strategies. These engineers create and implement the backbone of sustainability not only for compliance or as the right thing to do, but as the best option for the bottom line and for increasing manufacturing innovation.

Who solves our problems by making products smarter and more connected, especially with their eye on improved functionality, scalability, safety and security? With a projected 31 billion connected devices worldwide by the year 2025*, who are the systems engineers who will do the connecting and make sure devices operate at peak performance? As IoT champions, Embedded Software Engineers solve for specific problems by analyzing, designing, developing, testing, implementing, and maintaining the embedded software within a product and the supporting systems, turning non-traditional devices into mini computing devices, each with smarter functions to play and value to offer. *(Source: Statista, IOT and non IOT connections worldwide 2010-2025, March 8, 2021)

Who’s mastered the art of continuous improvement, using quality assurance methodologies to develop and document quality systems and processes, manage testing and inspection, identify problems, and recommend changes that will improve performance, maximize operations, reduce costs, and improve effectiveness and efficiency? Who’s both detail-driven and broad-view focused, predictive and proactive, building quality and security into product and process from the very start? The Quality Engineer designs quality standards, processes, and products; develops quality control systems for monitoring and testing; audits for software quality assurance, manufacturing process quality, product quality, and general business process quality, and contributes to corrective actions and improvements.

The Digital Twin Architect serves as the framework master: they develop and manage the guidelines, meta-models, tools and standards for creating and communicating virtual representations of a product, process, or system. With a strong understanding of full product lifecycle, industry process technologies, and systems in digital manufacturing environments, this role enables the exploration of new design capabilities and performance optimization. The Digital Twin Architect enables both physical and digital representations to be visible and shareable between systems, platforms, and tools from one consistent, verified source. The role has a strong focus on architecture but often combines other engineering and software development duties.

As manufacturing spaces transition from the old “dirty, dark, and dangerous” to the “factory of the future,” the automation technician role is highly valuable to companies and an excellent career opportunity for workers. This role assists, increasingly performs individually, and then oversees tasks that troubleshoot, operate, and maintain industrial machines and instrumentation, automation, and control systems for equipment at manufacturing and processing facilities.