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The purpose of this paper is to present competences that are highly relevant for manufacturing today and tomorrow. Following a discussion on the concept of “competence”, a variety of competences are presented and classified into the four facets professional, methodological, social, and self-competence.

Using an exploratory method, the paper aims at describing relevant manufacturing-related competences with the help of an online survey. Experts, mostly from the production management or HR departments of manufacturing companies in Germany, were polled and asked to evaluate the relevancy of a list of competences for manufacturing.

For the experts, flawless execution and quality awareness are competences with a very high relevance, whereas analytical abilities have very little meaning. The experts questioned expect openness to change to undergo the strongest increase in importance.

This paper shows competences particularly relevant for future production, so that companies can derive specific competence development measures. The findings are descriptive only, but should enable companies to identify specific competence gaps and to select measures to develop competences.

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between academics and practice by outlining relevant manufacturing competences that have been evaluated by managers. This is in contrast to most scientific research that classifies manufacturing-related competences as important based on own assessment.