No matter what good or product is planned and designed - nothing happens until someone makes it - and then markets and sells it.
Production and Quality Assurance are at the center of what Advanced Manufacturing is all about. The Production process involves making or fabricating goods or products. The Quality Assurance process ensures consumers and businesses that what they are buying is safe, worth the price, and will perform as advertised.
If you are interested in advanced manufacturing Production and Quality Assurance, the kind of jobs and careers that you might consider include the following:
What you'll be doing all day:
Basically, you'll be making things with metal. Lathes, milling machines, shapers, and grinders will all be part of your daily work. You'll run computer-controlled machining tools that are accurate down to a few micrometers. And you'll work with finish tools to perfect each piece you've made.
When you're working with this much metal, you'll become familiar with different types of material. And you'll be in charge of metalworking projects from planning and fabrication through assembly, inspection, and testing, using knowledge of machine functions, metal properties and mathematics.
What someone with a little experience makes (roughly):
$32,600
What type of education you'll need: On the Job Training
What you'll be doing all day: Remember how you never thought you'd use trigonometry after high school? Here's where you're proven wrong. Take some trig, a vast knowledge of metal, and some good old hands-on work, and the next thing you know, you're fabricating and assembling structural metal products.
Cutting, hammering, welding, bending, shearing, pressing-if you can do it to metal, you will. Of course this job is more than power tools and brute force. In addition to the previously mentioned trig, you'll need to be able to read and draw up blueprints, test specifications, and more.
What someone with a little experience makes (roughly): $28,600
What type of education you'll need: On the Job Training
What you'll be doing all day: Making sure things work like they're supposed to. You could be testing pants to make sure they're not going to fall apart after one washing. Maybe you're testing ice cream to ensure there are enough cookies in the Cookies 'n Cream. You might even get to hop on a motorcycle and make sure it rides like it's supposed to.
What someone with a little experience makes (roughly): $33,280
What type of education you'll need: High School, Associate's Degree
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Advanced manufacturing companies can be found in every state and region of the country, but some places have more of these businesses than others. You can begin to explore where these companies are in your community by using CareerOneStop. Under the "Career Tools" section on the homepage, access the "Employer Locator" link and make a series of selections to identify the names of potential employers in your state and hometown.
Local newspapers, trade organizations, and labor unions can also be useful sources for learning about advanced manufacturing companies and their employment opportunities.
The above sample occupations are from the National Association of Manufacturers' Dream It, Do It web site (www.dreamit-doit.com), which introduces young people to these and other career opportunities in advanced manufacturing. This source also describes the education and training needed for these careers.
For a quick overview of what this site offers, click the link.
Finally, you can look into the advanced manufacturing education and training opportunities right here at Career Voyages by clicking any of the orange buttons below.
Check out the information these other sites have to offer!
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