Current Skills Gap in Manufacturing: Towards a New Skills Framework for Factories of the Future

In the Factories of the Future framework, cutting-edge ICT developments have been accomplished by the industry, triggering new professional needs, which lead to new learning and training needs and new roles, especially regarding high-skilled labor force. Under this light, in this paper we define and analyze further the reasons triggering what is known as a "skills gap" in the world of European and global manufacturing, before reviewing applied solutions. Missing roles and related manufacturing skills, necessary for the development and progress of Factories of the Future, are then identified, based on surveys which reveal the voices of industrial stakeholders dispersed in the international market. The present analysis was conducted in the frame of the FP7 FoF project "ManuSkills", which aims to study the use of enhanced ICT-based technologies and training methodologies to facilitate an increase of young talent interest in manufacturing and to support their training of new manufacturing skills.