Dave Goodenough is passionate about STEM education for young people and about attracting, retaining talent for the automation and robotics industry. We touched on this topic during a conversation we had during a RIA webinar last year and were finally able to nail down a date to talk about attracting youth into manufacturing and robotics integration.

 

Here are some of the topics we talked about during the podcast:

 

Manufacturing is not a dirty business anymore and we need to educate the educators, the principles, guidance counselor, and teachers. High school may be too late, we need to start in grade school and we need to reach the parents.

 

There are lots of hands-on opportunities in robotics and manufacturing: engineering, electronics, programming, robotics, pneumatics, machine vision, automation integration, applications engineering, marketing and sales.

 

Opportunities to give back to young people through First Robotics, changing lives forever by being a mentor, volunteer, or fundraiser and building teams and friendships that can last for decades.

 

We talk about the importance of tours, parades, working with competitors, mentorship, sponsorship, apprenticeship and sportsmanship.

 

Some good news: the #TheRobotIndustryPodcast has been recognized in the Top 25 Robotics Podcasts by Feedspot. With over a million podcasts out there (and over 600,000 active podcasts, that is great. You can find the big list at https://blog.feedspot.com/robotics_podcasts/. Kind thanks to the team and Anuj Agarwal, CEO of Feedspot for letting us know.

 

Enjoy the podcast,

 

Jim

 

Firstinspires.org is mentioned in the podcast. Dave Goodenough is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-goodenough-927a8910/