Attracting Young Talents to Manufacturing: A Holistic Approach

Abstract

In the last years, despite the global economic crisis, manufacturing is facing a serious difficulty in the recruitment of the brightest high-skilled human resources. National and international institutions have provided important guidelines to combat this skills mismatch and several innovations have been made both in STEM and manufacturing education. However, there is still a lack of concrete strategies harmonizing together delivery mechanisms and pedagogical frameworks throughout the whole student lifecycle. In order to mitigate these urgent needs, ManuSkills innovative approach provides a strong integrated strategy towards attracting young talent to manufacturing, by raising the awareness and providing the acquisition of new manufacturing skills. The key-concepts and the strategy to achieve learning objectives are presented. Finally, ManuSkills Five Pillars, i.e. Interaction with the Experiments, Interaction with real companies, Social networks, Challenges and making real products, Career management and skills orientation, are explained in detail with the support of examples of application. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.