Industrial Automation career outlook?

[Weskee32]

Hi everybody, I would like to get some input on the future of automation in the industrial manufacturing realm.
I have about 2 years experience as an automation tech in the mining industry, using platforms such as Allen Bradley, Siemens, ABB, Fanuc, and Festo to automate packaging lines, extruders and kiln furnaces. I have a 2 year degree in in industrial automation, and recently enrolled full time at a university to pursue electrical engineering.
From what I can tell there seems to be a skills gap in this field, especially in the rural areas (where I live). In my area(and I can only speak from my experience) there are only a handful of older guys who work as the plant maintenance man, they do a little of everything mechanical, electrical, basic ladder logic troubleshooting,etc.
But when the robots stop working and the FROM/SRAM needs to be replaced , or the Siemens plc needs to be upgraded, or a new machine needs to be programmed to talk to a database on the network, what do these manufacturers do? They call up their friends in Germany and buy some guy a plane ticket to fly out to somewhere in the sticksville, USA to fix the problem. Building new plants is simply contracted out to European integrators instead of using the manufacturers internal resources. Once again, this is only from my personal experience in small town Midwest.
I would like everyones opinion if my perspective is completely out of reality or if yall have found some similarities with my views.
This is all being said, is investing years of my time and energy into the automation field worth it? I love this field, and I see so much opportunity, I think many modern factories lack things like smart networks, and machine to machine communications, and I have so many ideas to improve automation. It takes a lot of work in my opinion to keep up with technology and learning never stops.
One example is a plant I knew could have saved so much downtime by having their production data sent to a DB and having the other machines react to this data, however they couldn't find anyone who could set this up locally! It makes me wonder if this is a common problem.
Your thoughts are well appreciated and I am looking forward to the discussion.

[Marka]

Hey,
Industrial automation is not going anywhere. And having a more expansive background, in both practical experience and education will only further your future job prospects. You seem like you are on a good path. With your experience and future education, you are probably going to be a hot commodity due to what I see, which is an aging support group for automation equipment. This is on of the leaders of Industrial automation https://eltra-trade.com/catalog/stock