The Machine Tool Industry’s Changing Skills Needs: What is the Impact of Additive Manufacturing Technologies?

The machine tool sector (MT) has entered a new era characterized by the emergence of new technologies such as additive manufacturing (AM). Several reasons account for the rising attention on AM: the opportunity to better customize final products, localize the manufacturing process, minimize waste in production and bring down inventory costs. This trend highlights the need to address possible implications in several aspects of AM, including skills. The analysis conducted by the METALS (MachinE Tool ALliance for Skills) project on skills requirements yielded a clear conclusion. As AM will move closer to series production, the relevance of workforce competent in additive production methods will rise in the MT sector. The skillset will gradually evolve into a hybrid one, where conventional competences in subtractive manufacturing will be coupled with new skills specific to the processes with additive machines. These new competences will be concentrated in stages such as design, data pre-processing and file manipulation, post-processing, testing and maintenance. Moreover, greater soft skills in communication, presentation and rising Industry 4.0 technologies will be part of this evolved skill set. They will become more acute as growing competition will put greater emphasis on marketing. To deliver AM skills, work-based education and strong cooperation between educators and industry provide great opportunities.