Close industrial skills gaps with Augmented Reality
The challenge to keep and retain skilled workers is not a new one, but the skills gap has been accelerating in recent years. By 2025, experts predict that over 2 million skilled manufacturing jobs will go unfilled compared to 600,000 in 2011.
The manufacturing industry is faced with serious pressures such as the following:
- A lack of systems to produce new generations of skilled workers.
- Competition with other types of jobs.
- Continued global economic expansion means more jobs, in more locations.
- Physical assets requiring skills are becoming more complex and individualized.
With these growing issues, industry leaders need to take action to ensure they are able to fill gaps and continue to grow. Adapting modern tools such as Augmented Reality (AR) are proving to be highly effective at closing industrial skills gaps, here’s how:
- Remote assistance apps allow experts to share expertise, without physically having to travel on-site. This reduces the burden on senior experts, while retaining them longer as “virtual gurus.”
- As experts reach retirement age, they can provide consulting on AR experiences using product visualization and procedural guidance. This turns their individual expertise into a shareable skills resource. Using AR to amplify current skills
- Remote assistance reduces the cost of providing highly skilled support. By lowering costs, companies can direct skilled resources to help smaller, more remote customers.
- Procedural guidance provides workers with construction, equipment status, and performance data while they’re working.
- Newer workers can become effective in the field faster, with reduced risk of novice errors. It also benefits workers of all skill levels with step-by-step depictions of equipment and process customization.
Industrial organisations are massively aware of the growing skills crisis, with market leaders increasingly embracing AR as a way of preserving skills and staying ahead of their competitors.
Here is a video example of how PTC’s Vuforia Enterprise Augmented Reality Suite can provide solutions for a variety of use cases and industry verticals, and how it can transform how industrial workforce's communicate, learn and work.
If you’re interested in learning more about the role that AR can play at your organization, or how to get started building your own low-risk, high-reward AR solution please contact us at info@visionid.ie.
Find out more about PTC’s Vurforia AR platform here.
