Call it a perfect storm or the worst-case scenario, but a convergence of factors is giving the manufacturing industry headaches in the labor department.
As the industry is moving out of the economic recession and continues to add jobs, older skilled workers ― those who perform advanced procedures other than repetitive assembly ― are retiring or getting close to retirement. What makes that situation worse is that there aren’t enough new ones to replace them.
“That created the perfect storm for the tremendous skills gap that’s out there,” says Chad Schron, manager of Tooling University, an online training site based in Cleveland for manufacturers and vocational schools. “There weren’t enough in the pipeline of new people learning welding, fabrication and machining and entering the work force as employees started to retire.”
Mark Tomlinson, executive director and general manager of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, sees the skilled worker shortage as an iceberg looming on an uneasy sea.
“We’re just approaching it; we haven’t hit it yet but we know it’s there,” he says. “People are starting to see it. They just don’t know how to deal with it.”
Before companies focus on how to deal with the situation, they need to take a retrospective look to see the trends that have put the manufacturing sector in troubled waters.
Evaluate the factors
While forecasts of a shortage of skilled manufacturing workers first arose in the 1980s, it has been in recent decades that it became reality as the industry evolved from needing low-skilled production-type assembly workers to being highly technology-infused as it follows lean principles.
“If you go on today’s manufacturing floor, it’s extremely high-tech, lots of computers, lots of lasers, lots of robotics, very high-precision, a very clean environment where they’re making some of the advanced aerospace or medical device parts,” Schron says.
Companies who haven’t already heeded that wakeup call need to realize that times are changing.
Technology innovations enabled companies to reduce the number of employees and required higher skills and education levels of remaining workers, says Emily Stover DeRocco, president of The Manufacturing Institute of Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to improving and expanding manufacturing in America.
The automotive industry, once the sector that provided the lion’s share of jobs in manufacturing, is not as strong as it was a decade ago. Some automotive suppliers did not survive the recession. Many cut their training programs. Those that did survive often diversified into other areas of manufacturing.
“Now there is an increased need to fill the manufacturing jobs associated with aerospace, energy, medical device manufacturing and aspects of transportation,” Tomlinson says.
While many observers acknowledge that manufacturing has led the United States out of the recession, the improvement brings a mixed blessing ― more skilled workers are being needed, but the supply is limited.
“What we’re seeing right now is really a lack of a pipeline, and the disruption is causing us so much pain,” says Jeff Joerres, chairman, president and CEO of Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup, a work force solutions supplier.
Baby boomers, who have put in their time over the last few decades, are reaching retirement age. U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics estimate that 2.8 million, nearly a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing workers, are 55 or older.
“We are facing a huge replacement requirement for the retiring baby boomers, as well as a huge quality issue in the level of education and skills that are necessary to work in today’s more advanced manufacturing environment,” DeRocco says.
Building up the skilled worker pipeline is taking time because of a number of factors, including a waning interest in mathematics and science fields.
“I think we’ve got a long-term history of not producing enough skilled workers in the area of science and math and technology in this country,” says Ed Hughes, president of Gateway Community and Technical College in Florence, Ky. “We are now seeing some effects of not having students graduate from public and private schools with significant skills in those areas.”
Jim Ferguson, director of training at precision manufacturer Penn United Technologies of Cabot, Pa., agrees.
“There is definitely a skill gap in terms of people’s ability to do basic math at the level we need, which isn’t super high, but certainly, geometry and a little trigonometry are an important part of the package,” he says. “We find very few people are able to pass even a basic aptitude test to be hired.”
