Industry 4.0 awareness of engineers working manufacturing sector: East Marmara development region research

Throughout history, technological, scientific and social developments have guided humanity. Humanity, which started production by transforming from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society with agriculture and settled life, provided mechanization in production with the 1st Industrial Revolution and turned into an industrial society. They established standards in production by meeting with mass production and electricity with the 2nd Industrial Revolution. In the 3rd Industrial Revolution, also known as the digital revolution, the use of automation in production has increased and production with computers has gained importance. Access to information has accelerated and information society has emerged with the widespread use of computers in daily life. While Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution, announced at the Hannover Fair in Germany in 2011, aims to completely remove people and muscle power from production with groundbreaking innovations and to hand over production to smart robots, the super-intelligent society or Society 5.0, announced by the Japanese Government aims to increase our quality of life by adapting the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution to our daily life. Countries need to adapt to this phenomenon, which transforms all processes from production to economy and our social life, with new policies, changes in the production processes of companies and people's self-development, and attain this trend. The aim of this study is to measure the Industry 4.0 conceptual awareness of engineers working in the East Marmara region.For this purpose, 296 questionnaires were reached with a 51-item questionnaire and by using easy sampling method. 264 questionnaires were analyzed in SPSS 26 program by removing the missing and unusable questionnaires from the collected questionnaires. According to the data obtained as a result of the analysis, it has been determined that the Industry 4.0 conceptual awareness level of the engineers working in the East Marmara region is at a medium level (x̄=2.89). Considering the importance of the Industry 4.0 ecosystem and technologies in terms of regional and social development, a number of suggestions have been made to increase the level of Industry 4.0 awareness.