First Coursera self-check answer.

Recently I've decided to learn something new, and that will at the same time accompany my older skills, the main one being Chinese market sourcing, but instead of sourcing for traditional entities and factories, now I need to upskill to be able to source for actors of the future, and even help develop the promising and merciless wave of smart economies and industry 4.0.

I've made the move to enroll in a DMD ( Digital Manufacturing and Design) course, through Coursera, one of the few courses related to industry 4.0 that doesn't require any previous knowledge or experience on the matter. Here I'm sharing my first answer to the first self-check quiz: What are the effects of industry 4.0 on People?

The effects of industry 4.0 on people can be felt on a wide range of aspects, be it from workers, customers, or manufacturer’s perspectives. When it comes to workers, there is an important shift in the needed skillsets to accompany the revolution that is happening, hence a need for an adapted and adequate new educational system to provide more room for new learning ways and content also backed by new technology advancements and orientations, and we can already see a surge in concepts such as "Schools of the future" or "Education 4.0" under the banner of a Reskilling Revolution.

Coming to customers, thanks to the amounts of data collected and stored, higher levels of customizations will be answering their preferences in increasingly efficient ways, which will at the same time drive more differentiation and diversification that will keep narrowing down the features of the product to what is best for the consumers and their well being. This will eventually create an unshakeable sense of customer loyalty thanks to the increased customer interaction, providing them with updated products with added benefits for their specific needs.

Concerning the manufacturers, they will benefit from this revolution in many ways, such as enhanced and improved workflows throughout the entire PLC, from planning to disposal, passing by designing, and other key phases of the manufacturing process. Manufacturers will win big in more efficient processes that can now be deployed in simultaneous less consuming fashions, rather than the soon obsolete "one at a time" approach.

The effects of industry 4.0 on people, on a human level:

The fourth industrial revolution will have a direct impact not just on the products and services we consume, but the way we are, the way we live, from eating, sleeping, moving, and interacting with our surroundings to the ways our health is taken care of and even our core values and ethics as humankind.

as Klaus Schwab said "one of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that It doesn't change what we are doing, but it changes us", Industry 4.0 is introducing itself as a humankind savior, focused on humans well being rather than just growth, this is truly our optimistic expectation, but only time will let us see its extents and how it will actually affect people.