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Abstract Introduction Fast-emerging technologies are making the job market dynamic, causing desirable skills to evolve continuously. It is therefore important to understand the transitions in the job market to proactively identify skill sets required. Case description A novel data-driven approach is developed to identify trending jobs through a case study in the oil and gas industry. The proposed approach leverages a range of data analytics tools, including Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Factor Analysis and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), to study changes in the market. Further, our approach is capable of identifying disparities between skills that are covered by the educational system, and the skills that are required in the job market. Discussion and evaluation The results of the case study show that, while the jobs most likely to be replaced are generally low-skilled, some high-skilled jobs may also be at risk. In addition, mismatches are identified between skills that are imparted by the education system and the skills required in the job market. Conclusions This study presents how job market and skills required evolved over time, which can help decision-makers to prepare the workforce for highly demanding jobs and skills. Our findings are in line with the concerns that automation is decreasing the demand for certain skills. On the other hand, we also identify the new skills that are required to strengthen the need for collaboration between minds and machines.

Thin-walled features can be difficult to produce with traditional machining methods which often rely on excess stock material for stiffness. This challenge is increased in hybrid manufacturing where the feature is already near net shape before machining. Significant workpiece deflection can result in poor geometric and surface finish tolerances on the finished part. A potential solution to this problem is to implement sacrificial support structures to the as-printed geometry. The supports are then machined away during the finishing portion of the hybrid process. In the present work, several different design parameters for these sacrificial supports were evaluated to determine their impact on the quality of representative thin wall geometry samples. The angle, height, and spacing of triangular support structures were varied for each sample and then machined and examined. The addition of these supports relative to an unsupported configuration provided a deflection reduction of around 0.2 mm. Surface roughness was improved by approximately 1.5 µm. Increasing values of support height were found to correspond to reduced wall deflection. Similarly, decreasing values of support angle and support spacing improved geometric accuracy. Efficiency comparisons showed that increases in print time corresponded to rapidly diminishing gains in geometric accuracy but continued to improve surface roughness. Implications for hybrid finishing of additively manufactured thin-walled structures is briefly discussed.

Hybrid manufacturing machine tools have great potential to revolutionize manufacturing by combining both additive manufacturing (AM) and subtractive manufacturing (SM) processes on the same machine tool. A prominent issue that can occur when going from AM to SM is that the SM process toolpath does not account for geometric discrepancies caused by the previous AM step, which leads to increased production times and tool wear, particularly when wire-based directed energy deposition (DED) is used as the AM process. This work discusses a methodology for approximating a part’s surface topology using on-machine contact probing and formulating an optimized SM toolpath using the surface topology approximation. Three different geometric surface approximations were used: triangular, trapezoidal, and a hybrid of both. SM toolpaths were created using each geometric approximation and assessed according to three objectives: reducing total machining time, reducing surface roughness, and reducing cutting force. Different prioritization scenarios of the optimization goals were also investigated. The optimal surface approximation that yielded the most improvement in the optimization was determined to be the hybrid surface topology approximation. Furthermore, it was shown that when the machining time or cutting force optimization goals were prioritized, there was little improvement in the other optimization goals.