what industry needs. “What we’ve heard from industry people is that they have to hire traditional engineering graduates and then train them to bring them up to speed in automation,” says Buchanan. This training can not only take years, but also requires a substantial investment.

Buchanan believes that a correctly designed automation engineering degree program could help alleviate this problem. “I realize the difference between training and education, and you don’t want to turn this into a training certificate,” he says. “But I think you can integrate theory and application, and academia and industry needs in such a way that a student could graduate with a bachelor’s degree and walk into industry and be productive on the first day.”

An automation engineering degree program will be unique, in that students will learn traditional engineering discipline skills, but those skills will be applied across multiple discipline boundaries, Buchanan explains. Automation engineering merges the fundamentals of electrical, electronic, mechanical, environmental, computer, information and instrumentation, he says. Students will learn traditional math, science and engineering fundamentals, but the program will also have an automation core that is not available in any traditional program today.

This can then be buttressed by additional emphasis areas that are preferred by a school’s industrial constituents, says Buchanan. “One school could offer an engineering automation degree that has the engineering core, the automation core and emphasis courses in, say, process control, while another school could offer emphasis courses in manufacturing, or aerospace, or semiconductors, whatever their industrial constituents require.”

Buchanan declines to predict when the first automation engineering degree program will be launched at a U.S. university, but concedes he will be “disappointed” if it doesn’t happen within five years. Gouhin, for his part, expects that it will likely be 10 years or more before anything like critical mass is achieved, with a reasonable number of four-year institutions offering automation engineering degrees.

But Gouhin adds that the timescale could be shortened if industry were to align strongly behind the concept. If a lot of big end-user companies would say, “Here’s what we need, and we’re not getting it out of the university system,” it would give the ISA better leverage in pushing the idea with universities, and at the federal and state levels.

The ISA does have letters of support for the concept from some companies, Gouhin says. But others still see automation as a “specialty discipline,” and have been less supportive, he concedes. The Society is going back to these companies with an explanation of why it disagrees, Gouhin says, while also “working to improve the relationships we have in the corner offices of end-users.”

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