Are We Teaching What They Want? A Comparative Study of What AM Employers Want versus What AM Frameworks Require

In this research paper, we compare Florida’s AM employer demands and academic requirements to state mandated AM curriculum guidelines. Florida is an AM leader, producing intermediate and finished products ranging from plastics to tortillas to motor vehicles. In total, Florida is home to over 20,000 AM companies employing over 320,000 workers. Florida is also geographically diverse, being simultaneously one of the most urban and one of the most rural highly populous states in the country. To characterize Florida’s AM employment needs, we analyzed 108 job postings from Florida employers who were seeking manufacturing and engineering technicians through publicly available job postings. Text mining was used to extract key knowledge areas (or topics) and verbs in these documents that AM employers identified in job postings and desired from their entry-level employees. We compared those topics and verbs to the ones found in the Florida Department of Education’s (FLDoE) AM curriculum framework for two-year programs. We found varying levels of alignment, and, in some instances, misalignment, between employers’ desired topics and competency levels and those found in FLDoE Frameworks. Our findings not only highlight the importance of industry-education partnerships to tailor preparation to employer needs, but also suggest that a deeper exploration and analysis of AM jobs is needed to further determine alignment to FLDoE frameworks. We conclude that the FLDoE framework may be used as a foundation, but not the sole source, for important AM knowledge areas, leaving opportunity for the development of an AM body of knowledge that reflects employer expectations and geographic variations.