Only plastic parts really needs a mold to be produced. Metallic parts are produced on machining machines where the real knownledge sits in the ISO programmer he

Only plastic parts really needs a mold to be produced. Metallic parts are produced on machining machines where the real knownledge sits in the ISO programmer head. And plastic parts are more and more reserved for low end product, whereas high end products are all made of metal (think about a plane architecture being made of plastic instead of aluminium: this will not happen soon). So to be honest about your dad situation: from an industrial point of view I think the people outsourcing your dad's job in China were right: they did loose the know-how on keyboards molds and they do face a problem regarding keyboard quality nowadays, but that value gained in outsourcing low end parts was invested in machining technologies with very local jobs garanteed for a long industrial time. I'm sorry about your dad situation in that systemic change, and I'm glad he managed to move to another field, but what's at stake here is really what a was proposed in a parent comment: 'manual' labour being replaced with automation (and human tragedies involved unfortunately...).