- Need a dedicated degree (2 year as well as 4 year) in Manufacturing
- Trade schools and apprenticeship programs that do not sound like scam
- Automated material movement and handling
- Machine vision, automation of quality assurance
- Automated mold making and plastic injection molding optimization (still done by humans and takes 4 months)
- Factory software (ERP, MRP, MES, SPC, etc.)
At risk of someone posting the xkcd on standards, I would love to see an full industry wide consortium to establish _modern and well designed_ standards, led by people with experience making modern networked services and systems. Specifically around industrial machine controls and data/telemetry collection. A few standards exist that are roughly xml-rpc-ish, but they don't even follow that much as a standard. OPC-UA is the latest "standard" to be making the rounds and is (IMO) doomed to fail due to its layers of complexity and unclear specifications.