When Archytas started, I would often hear from my friends, 

“Automation is taking jobs away from people. Why are you starting an automation company?!?”

At Archytas, our answer to the tough “why” question is to join educators in the effort to equip people for the new advanced manufacturing jobs.

But how?

We began Archytas to solve problems for industrial customers. We didn’t set out to offer products and services to colleges and universities because we weren’t familiar with the needs of those customers. After conducting a survey of manufacturing companies, we learned that community colleges are their number one source for hiring new robot operators. 

Our target market is hoping community colleges will provide trained people to operate robots. 

Around the same time we were discovering this fact, we were receiving inquiries from a few schools about our robotic arm. As we dug deeper into conversations with schools we learned their biggest challenges were (after funding of course):

• Access to instructors
• Simple, easy to teach curriculum and lesson plans
• Space to store and operate robotic arms

Finally, we consistently heard from schools that exiting robot OEM’s models for engaging with community colleges was working.

What did we do?

We hired an educator, Laura Armstrong, to work with community colleges to solve this problem. She has been a great listener and collaborator with a small group of community colleges that expressed interest in participating in our pilot program. She has launched a set of labs that teach students how to use robotic arms in real world situations. We love the work that she is doing to accomplish our mission to help people and businesses thrive through automation.

There is still a lot of work to be done and we look forward to building more relationships with educators to advance our robotic arm training program. We appreciate the hard questions posed by people outside of Archytas. It has made us a better company and our work with community colleges is making us better humans.