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3D Printing: Opportunities for Higher Education


This spring, The Lanterman Group authored a piece for Deloitte focusing on opportunities for 3D printing in higher education with a focus on eventual career pathways in additive manufacturing and the skills needed to get there.

With Stratasys’ Gina Scala and Deloitte’s Mark Cotteleer and Jonathan Holdowsky, The Lanterman Group Founder and President Anthony Hughes examined the need for industry and academia to work together to develop and train the next generation of additive manufacturing talent.

Additive manufacturing (AM), which includes the process of 3D printing, is an advanced manufacturing workflow in which materials are built up into parts. Digital design and freedom from constraints of traditional (subtractive) manufacturing methods are enabling new possibilities in the way things are made. Among the many touted benefits are new geometries for lighter-weight designs made with fewer components, as well as small-volume and localized production.

With the advent of this manufacturing revolution come many promises -- not just in how things are made, but in who is able to make them, how, and where. As the “how” and “where” continually progress with regular advances in materials, hardware, and software capabilities and increasing adoption, it is the question of “who” that looms largest over this fast-growing industry.

A capable and skilled workforce familiar with the demands of AM is a rising need in industry, and as such is a growing focus for the educational world.

In first-hand research through conducted interviews with academic institutions and industry experts, The Lanterman Group, Deloitte, and Stratasys uncovered some intriguing pathways to unlocking the real potential of AM -- through educating a broader workforce.


Future of 3D Printing

3D printing is increasingly being put to use in production settings. As the manufacturing industry and other verticals embrace additive manufacturing into operations, executives are becoming much more aware of workforce needs. Namely, the conducted survey showed that executives believe that unlocking AM’s production potential requires a much different skillset from just an understanding of how to run a machine or rapidly-produce a prototype. Rather, to accelerate AM’s adoption rate, industry may need a broader workforce with knowledge of the capabilities of AM technologies and how to appropriately design, communicate, and qualify products.

Initiatives within academia directly impact workforce development. There remains significant room for enhancement of availability and depth of AM courses and curricula to appropriately develop the well-rounded workforce that industry is seeking.

The interviews with academic and industry professionals pointed to a clear call for action in that industry and academia should be working together to close the knowledge gap around commercializing AM technologies.

At a high level, this research revealed that commercializing products and scaling AM into the production setting typically requires knowledge in two distinct areas:

  • Design knowledge necessary to innovate and develop the AM product (i.e., product design, engineering, simulation, etc.)

  • Process knowledge required to manufacture the AM product (i.e., process and material selection, operations, quality, inspection, etc.)


Tomorrow’s AM Professional

To develop such specialized knowledge, The Lanterman Group and its partners uncovered five key workforce education “needs” highlighted by industry participants:

  • A multidisciplinary understanding of key AM-related knowledge areas—material science, design, engineering, etc.

  • Better design knowledge, specifically design-for-AM (“DfAM”) skills

  • A broader, more creative, and innovative mindset

  • A better understanding of AM’s ties to existing manufacturing processes, not just AM

  • A commercial mindset to understand the AM business case

The key here comes in that first bullet point: multidisciplinary education. Engineering, design, material science, and manufacturing are all critical to building a successful AM operation -- and understanding these all is thus critical to developing a successful candidate to run such an operation.

Many educational programs in AM today introduce what the technology is and how it works, with a process and material focus. This is not enough, as the consensus of respondents clearly indicated. An integrated knowledge process will create learners who can cross multidisciplinary boundaries to ultimately become constituents of, and advocates for, a stronger AM industry.

Fostering creativity in today’s learners is a key piece to the educational puzzle as well. Freeing learners from the constraints of traditional manufacturing requires freer thinking -- and a more creative (“out of the box”) mindset. Interviewees stated quite clearly that, beyond the foundational technical and design skills that are prerequisite, a creative mindset is just as important and identified it as a critical barrier to producing new innovative designs. These must, of course, be built upon a strong foundation of manufacturing knowledge, as AM is not a vacuum unto itself.

It bears repeating: What AM achieves, it does not achieve in isolation. AM should be thought of as part of a larger manufacturing ecosystem. AM practitioners should understand this truth and incorporate a broader manufacturing sensibility into their work; AM educators should strive to make this possible.

That ecosystem additionally includes business considerations that must make its way into training. For example, commercial issues such as intellectual property, liability, quality assurance, sustainability, and business impact deserve their fair share of attention in workforce development -- and of course in eventual business operation.

The five “needs” of the industry, explained earlier, reveal a picture of the “ideal” candidate: a multidisciplinary learner, with strong roots in design and creativity, grounded in manufacturing process fundamentals. The ideal candidate would likely require an understanding of engineering design and application using AM technologies, in addition to knowing the manufacturing process fundamentals of machinery, materials, and resources all within the strategic business context.


The full Deloitte article is available here for a deeper discussion of these topics

Rich Wetzel