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posted by martyb on Monday September 09 2019, @05:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the Who-trains-the-trainers?-Engineers? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The skills gap is widening between people and AI.

Artificial Intelligence is apparently ready to get to work. Over the next three years, as many as 120 million workers from the world's 12 largest economies may need to be retrained because of advances in artificial intelligence and intelligent automation, according to a study released Friday by IBM's Institute for Business Value. However, less than half of CEOs surveyed by IBM said they had the resources needed to close the skills gap brought on by these new technologies.

"Organizations are facing mounting concerns over the widening skills gap and tightened labor markets with the potential to impact their futures as well as worldwide economies," said Amy Wright, a managing partner for IBM Talent & Transformation, in a release. "Yet while executives recognize severity of the problem, half of those surveyed admit that they do not have any skills development strategies in place to address their largest gaps."

[...] IBM says companies should be able to close the skills gap needed for the "era of AI," but that this won't necessarily be easy. The company said global research shows the time it takes to close a skills gap through employee training has grown by more than 10 times in the last four years. That's due in part to new skills requirements rapidly emerging, while other skills become obsolete.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 09 2019, @10:09PM (2 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday September 09 2019, @10:09PM (#891898) Journal

    Which decade were you speaking from? Chinese products were notoriously shoddy, yes. Today it is a matter of what precision one is willing to pay for. What comes out of Foxconn may be shoddily engineered, and may use shoddy parts because that is the spec of the designing company, but the construction and manufacturing of many products is anything but. (Which still doesn't mean you can't find a company which will still manufacture to shoddy tolerances....)

    It's hard to say without knowing your industry, but what likely happened is that you encountered a company that ripped your bosses off and quite possibly quoted a price that was too low. I'm glad they brought your molds back, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't any Chinese based company that could have handled the job more cheaply but correctly. (Not to mention that's why China tacitly allows their companies to enter into give-us-your-methodology-or-no-deal arrangements.... to improve their quality albeit in an ethically questionable way).

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 09 2019, @10:57PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 09 2019, @10:57PM (#891926) Journal

    Those molds were shipped to China just a little more than ten years ago now - 2007, 2008, or so. That "precision" you speak of? Yeah, more and more of the Chinese labor market is capable of precision work. There is also a large part of the labor market with rather poor education and no experience. The brighter bulbs among them can be trained to do low tolerance work, the dimmer bulbs not so much. No matter how I look at it, China is still twenty years away from what the US was in the 1970's regarding availability of skilled labor and technicians. (that is somewhat remarkable, considering they were largely an agrarian society only recently)

    Could they have found another Chinese company capable of producing the parts we make? I can't say, but it takes time to identify such a manufacturer, and to hammer out a deal with them.

    Maybe I should also add that various molds have been sent to competitors right here in the US, and their samples never reached QC standards. New York, Georgia, Ohio, Missourri, and Alabama all come to mind readily.

    And, finally, I will note that we have been a victim of idiot management. We contracted to supply hub rings to a major company. We got the mold, and struggled for weeks to process the parts. We finally got to the point were we were only producing about 20% waste. Over the course of several more weeks, we got waste down to about 10%. We ran that mold for almost two years, tolerating all that waste. And, no, we couldn't reclaim that waste very easily, it was a two-shot mold, with hard plastic in the first shot, and softer rubber-like plastic in the second shot, with the two plastics bonding to each other. You didn't just peel the rubber off, then re-grind the two plastics for reuse.

    Management plays as large, or larger, a role in shoddy goods as the labor pool. They had no business bringing those hub rings into our plant, unless they planned to purchase the proper machine to produce those parts.

    • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:14AM

      by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:14AM (#891974) Journal

      I've never done manufacturing management, but yes I can see that both QC is a real area of concern and it takes a very sharp pencil to figure out what an acceptable wasteage rate is - if getting 5% less waste results in 50% higher production costs then it might not be that good a deal. And I could also see that just as China might be gaining precision in some fields the U.S. can be losing it because there's not enough centralization. But I don't know that there is a really good ideal solution, either.

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