The electrical and automation industry has always been an important part of the industrial field. How will it develop in the next five years?
To pour cold water on it first, the industry will not “revolution”, but will only “evolve”.
Industrial automation is a conservative industry, and equipment has a long service life. Customers pay more attention to the stability and maintainability of equipment.
The technology that truly changes the field is the one that can withstand the test in the workshop, not the coolest one in the laboratory.
That is to say, technology can be radical, but implementation must be conservative.
The five real changes that are taking place are as follows:
Change 1: The “brain” of PLC is getting better and better, but it is not the AI in common cognition.
Mainstream PLC manufacturers add “intelligent functions” to the controller, such as built-in vibration spectrum analysis, self-tuning PID, gradient alarm instead of threshold alarm, etc. Although these are not “high-end”, they can solve practical problems on the front line of the workshop.
Large models and ChatGPT will not enter PLC in the short term, but “small and beautiful” lightweight AI is already quietly penetrating.
Change 2: Equipment networking is no longer a “face-saving project”.
In the past, the Industrial Internet of Things was mostly for display, but now the situation has changed, and its driving force comes from real economic accounts, customer requirements and operation and maintenance costs.
Nowadays, the purpose of networking is to “save people” and “save trouble”, and remote diagnosis, maintenance and unattended operation have become a necessity.
Change 3: Visual inspection is no longer “above”.
In the past, the cost of visual inspection systems was high, making it unaffordable for small factories.
Nowadays, domestic substitution has reduced hardware costs, “small models” have made deployment easier, and scenarios have become more vertical.
This provides opportunities for electrical engineers, as the visual inspection market expands and barriers to entry are lowered.
Change 4: Domestic substitution is a fact that is happening.
In the past, the automation field mainly relied on brands such as Siemens, Rockwell, and Mitsubishi. Nowadays, domestic PLCs and equipment are on the rise.
Inovance is comparable to Siemens V90 in the fields of motion control and servo drive. Xinjie, Delta, and INVT have obvious cost-effective advantages in the mid- to low-end market. Hechuan, Eston, and Newstar have doubled their shipments in the field of robots.
Although the core control systems of large-scale projects are still dominated by imported brands in the short term, in the fields of OEM equipment, non-standard automation, and new energy, domestic substitution has changed from “can it be used” to “is it easy to use”.
Change 5: “Soft skills” are widening the gap between engineers.
Ten years ago, mastering PLC programming, electrical diagram drawing and on-site debugging would lead to good development. Now these have become basic skills.
Soft skills such as communication skills, project management skills, industry knowledge and learning abilities have become the key to widening the gap.
In the next three to five years, the following things are likely to happen:
1. The boundary between electrical automation and IT will become more blurred.
More and more companies require electrical engineers to master Python for data collection, custom communication protocols and scripting tool writing.
2. “Service” is more valuable than “selling equipment”.
Equipment prices have dropped, fewer people can do the work, and the service value of system integrators has become more prominent.
3. The new energy vehicle industry chain will be the largest incremental market in the next five years, including power battery manufacturing, energy storage systems, charging piles and photovoltaic manufacturing.
4. “Unmanned” is accelerating, but the core of unmanned is “reliability”.
The current pragmatic route is to hand over simple repetitive tasks to machines, leave complex exception handling to humans, and electrical engineers need to design robust systems.
5. “One specialty, multiple abilities” will become the lowest threshold.
Automation engineers need to master a variety of skills, including PLC programming, communication protocols, electrical diagram drawing, inverter and servo debugging, etc.
A few suggestions are as follows:
Suggestion 1: Don’t worry about AI, learn Python first, which is used to process files, send HTTP requests, etc.
Suggestion 2: Accumulate your own “code base” and “knowledge base” to improve work efficiency.
Suggestion 3: Pay attention to new energy, but do not blindly change jobs. You can adopt the strategy of “maintaining stable main business and exploring side businesses”.
Suggestion 4: Spend 20% of your time doing “not urgent but important” things and accumulate skills and experience.
Suggestion 5: Operate your own “technology brand” to increase visibility and increase market value.
The electrical and automation industry is the “operating system” of the real economy. Although there will be changes in the future, it will not disappear.
Those who proactively embrace new technologies will see their incomes increase, while those who stay put may be reduced to “cheap labor.”
The choice is in everyone’s hands, and it’s never too late to start, but the earlier the better.
