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3D Opportunity for Higher Education
June 11, 2019 | Categories: Member News
Preparing the next generation of additive manufacturing professionals
Additive manufacturing is slowly but surely transforming product design and manufacturing. But to realize its true potential, industry and academia need to work together to develop and train the next generation of additive manufacturing talent.
Introduction
ADDITIVE manufacturing (AM) is revolutionizing the way many products are designed and manufactured. However, unless manufacturers can effectively scale this new technology into production uses, the real promise of AM may not be fulfilled. One of the challenges often identified as limiting AM’s scale is the lack of a capable and skilled AM workforce.1
To better understand the landscape of issues, challenges, and opportunities that form the basis of achieving a highly capable AM workforce, we conducted research with some of those who perhaps have the most at stake. This report—the output of interviews with academic institutions, and industry experts, and supplemented by secondary research (for more details, see the “Methodology” sidebar)—argues that the unlocking of AM’s potential resides in educating a broader workforce, and that the opportunity for industry and academia to work together to educate the next generation of AM talent is at once real and significant.
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