The future shop-floor operators, demands, requirements and interpretations

This paper describes the evolution of the shop-floor operator, according to the research literature and interviews with manufacturing managers and human resources specialists. In addition, the paper presents the response of future Swedish shop-floor operators, today's high-school students, to a description of their possible future work as shop-floor operators. The Swedish manufacturing industry competes, to a large extent, on and responds to the international market. The findings made in this paper are thus also interesting for other industries and countries acting on the international market.