State of 3D printing 2018 on its way!

Posted By Jessica Van Zeijderveld on May 23, 2018 | 0 comments

Stay on the lookout for our annual State of 3D Printing: the 2018 edition! This ebook, based on our survey, allows for the 3D printing industry to get the latest insights and data on additive manufacturing related topics. With these new findings, the outline of the future of 3D printing can be described by comparing the new results to last year’s State of 3D Printing 2017. For this year’s survey, we received over a 1000 respondents along with representatives from industries such as the industrial goods, consumer goods, and the aeronautical sector.

What can you expect?

The 2018 edition of The State of 3D Printing includes elaborative and insightful analyses on the following topics:

• The growth and maturity of the 3D Printing industry
• The use of 3D Printing by power users
• The use of 3D Printing by relevant sectors
• The trends related to 3D printing materials, technologies, and finishes
• The development of profile hiring
• The overall evolution of the 3D Printing industry over the years

Our respondents

This year, over a 1000 people filled out our survey! We would like to thank each and every one of these respondents for taking the time and for offering their insights regarding the use of additive manufacturing in their company or industry. This year, 3% of our respondents were younger than 17, 29% were between the age of 18 and 29,  54% were between the ages of 30 and 54 and 14% were older than 55. As for where our respondents originated from, the majority of them came from Europe and a quarter of them came from the United States. A nice change to see in the gender of our respondents is the fact that there were more women in our sample compared to last year. About 12% of them were women and 88% were men. Also, we see that 45% of our respondents were professionals and 45% were hobbyists.

Sectors

So, if we look at what sectors our respondents came from, we see that most of them, 17%,  came from the industrial goods sector, 12% came from the consumer goods sector, 7% came from the aeronautical industry and 6% came from the healthcare sector. Of course, we have respondents from other sectors such as the high tech sector with 5%, services with 6%, the education sector with 6% and the mechanical and metal industry with 5%. As you can see, very different industries who were all able to implement 3D printing.

Role

Our respondents have very different roles in their company or business. This way, by asking what role you have, we can see how 3D printing is used by very different people with very different goals. 29% are the CEO or owner of their business which is the same percentage of engineers as well.  8% are designers, 6% freelancers and another 6% of them have a role in the production part of their company.

What did we find?

But of course, these facts are not nearly as interesting as what we have in store for you in the actual ebook. We found that additive manufacturing allows for a more dynamic job market but more importantly, we’ve seen that 3D printing is really at the heart of a business’ priorities. We saw that investments in 3D printing exploded in 2017 along with companies finding this manufacturing type a competitive advantage!

Ready for the newest version?

It’s nearly there! Keep your eyes open for the full report but in the meantime, find last year’s edition here. Would you like to have a quick overview on the results, then you can read the blogpost of a summary here. Meanwhile, if you’d like to read quick bits of additive manufacturing related news, you can subscribe to our newsletter here. More into social media? Click on the link to find our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Instagram – and we’ll make sure you never miss out on the latest innovations.