Controllers are expected to be good at:

• Using either control mechanisms or direct physical activity to operate manufacturing systems.
• Working with hand operated industrial machines and power tools.
• Adjusting knobs, levers, and physical or touch sensitive buttons in industrial devices.
• Running, maneuvering, navigating, or driving vehicles or mechanized equipment, such as forklifts, passenger vehicles, aircraft, or watercraft.

Technicians will often be asked these tasks:

• Providing documentation, detailed instructions, drawings, or specifications to tell others about how devices, parts, equipment, or structures are to be fabricated, constructed, assembled, modified, maintained, or used.
• Using computers and computer systems (including hardware and software) to program, write software, set up functions, enter data, or process information.
• Servicing, repairing, calibrating, regulating, fine-tuning, or testing machines, devices, and equipment that operate primarily on the basis of electrical or electronic (not mechanical) principles.

• Determining the sequence of machine operations, and selecting the proper cutting tools needed to machine workpieces into the desired shapes.
• Revising programs or tapes for eliminating errors, and retest programs to checking that problems have been solved.
• Analyzing job orders, drawings, blueprints, specifications, printed circuit board pattern films, and design data for calculating dimensions, tool selection, machine speeds, and loading rates.
• Determining reference points, machine cutting paths, or hole locations, and computing angular and linear dimensions, radii, and curvatures.
• Observing machines on trial runs or conducting computer simulations for ensuring that programs and machinery will function properly and producing items that meet specifications.
• Entering coordinates of hole locations into programs memories by depressing pedals or buttons of programmers.
• Writing programs in the language of a machine’s controller and storing programs on media such as punch tapes, magnetic tapes, or disks.