Continuing education and part-time training on additive manufacturing for people in employment - an approach focused on content-related and didactical excellence

Additive manufacturing technologies (AM) have become a production technology during the last years. Originally, the only field of application for AM was the time-efficient production of prototypes-also known as Rapid Prototyping. During the last 5 years, a significant increase of applications for Direct part production can be observed, especially in Aerospace and Medical industry as well as in General Engineering. For this reason, there is a strong demand for experts in AM today that cannot be met by university graduates because AM has, most of the time, not been represented in their curriculum. In addition, AM industry is highly dynamic which leads to a significant amount of new knowledge and relevant progress every year. So, continuing education and part-time training on Additive Manufacturing for people in employment is crucial for economic sustainable growth and application of AM in industry. This contribution aims to introduce a learning quality focused and didactically sound concept for part-time training in AM.