Digital mechanical engineers could soon be top dogs in the workplace.
Workers who can marry engineering and data analysis will soon be indispensable, GE chief economist Marco Annunziata says
Q: Who will be highly valued in the new era of smart machines?
Annunziata: The Industrial Internet starts with the marriage of data and machines, so you will have stronger demand for people who know data and people who know the machines.
Q: What do you call someone who knows both the data and the machines?
Annunziata: Digital mechanical engineers. They should combine both the digital aspect and the more mechanical aspects of engineering.
Q: Do many people have that combination of skills?
Annunziata: My sense is very few. So you start by leveraging mechanical engineers and data scientists.
Q: What is a data scientist?
Annunziata: Somebody who knows how to work with pretty much any kind of large data. Suppose you had a gigantic data set which comes to you completely blind. You have no idea where these data come from. A data scientist is somebody who understands a large number of data analysis techniques to sift through these numbers and try to figure out what the data can tell them.
Q: What kind of jobs will be created in cyber security?
Annunziata: The security of data will be a paramount priority. You will have lots of people who are experts in computer science. Cyber security already is an industry. The skills already exist.
Q: What other jobs will be valued?
Annunziata: To the extent this brings a boom to an industry, you will need more of the skills that already operate in the industry. You have skilled employees who don't necessarily have engineering degrees or even college degrees, so whether it's welders or other specialized manufacturing employees, all these specialized skills will be in stronger demand.
To the extent that the economic benefits spread, they will spill over into higher demand for services, for entertainment, education, travel.
Marco Annunziata is the Chief Economist and Executive Director of Global Market Insight at General Electric Co., responsible for economic, financial and market analysis to support GE's business strategy. He is the author of The Economics of the Financial Crisis (2011). He holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University and a BA in Economics from the University of Bologna.
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