Maintenance-Automation Engineer: Realistic Considerations for a New Curricula

In the last few years the technology industry has changed quickly specially due to the development in the semiconductor area, software progress and new materials. From the operational point of view, it can be said that, one of the greatest advances was in the maintenance tests area that followed the same advanced pace of the previous referred areas, and which was permitted by its development. Managers in the industry have made effort to reduce costs and to increase productivity without changing teams. They are looking for new engineers with special knowledge, mainly related with good formation for operate and manage automated process, with joined qualification for acting in consonance with the updated philosophies maintenance. But it is not easy to find them because the university doesn´t update engineering courses at the same speed as it is demanded by the industry. Like this, some Engineering Curricula are old and incomplete and cannot meet those real professional necessities in the industry. The purpose of this paper is to present a new profile suggestion for Engineering, considering these real needs due to the advances in computer, communications, process control, quality standard, and automation process, in a new industrial reality. It will describe a research about the actual status of maintenance/automation professional in the south region of Rio de Janeiro State in Brazil and analyze some results that it suppose can inspire a new formation for the engineering professional referred above.