Hal Weitzman provided an article in the Financial Times that discussed the recent trend towards reshoring of manufacturing jobs and production back into the US. The focus was on new manufacturing operations in general, and, in particular, on the effort by an outfit called Element to make a go of manufacturing large-scale television sets in the US. Weitzman details the costs and benefits of local manufacture and explains the issues that Element faced in generating a successful operation. One of the problems encountered was quite disturbing.
"Other US manufacturers may not be able to copy that idea. The sector has 600,000 unfilled positions because of a lack of qualified skilled workers, according to a report by Deloitte, the consultants, and the National Association of Manufacturers. "There is certainly a question that the lack of skills could hamper the short-term reshoring efforts," says Deloitte’s Craig Giffi."
Our high schools and colleges are cranking out millions of graduates who face the prospect of unemployment or underemployment, and yet our manufacturing sector is hampered by a lack of skilled applicants! What is going on?
A second article from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business elaborates on the state of manufacturing and its need for trained employees. It reports on results from a study performed by some of its staff.
One of the issues that business and political leaders must deal with if this potential growth is to be realized is a lack of appropriately trained individuals.
"The U.S. risks becoming a country with wide divergence between rich skilled workers and poor unskilled workers, Hopp says. Industry leaders surveyed by the study's authors confirmed that technically savvy production workers are hard to find in the U.S. but are more abundant in other countries."
An explanation is suggested for why we cannot provide the necessary workers.
"’If you talk about manufacturing long enough, all roads eventually lead to education,’ Hopp says. ‘A huge determinant of how many manufacturing jobs remain in the U.S. will be our ability to create a skilled workforce’."
Many countries provide alternate educational paths for their children. At some point they are encouraged, or coerced by rigid testing standards, to follow either a university-bound path or a vocational path. In our school system one graduates from high school and either goes to a college or is pushed out onto the street. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Neither article emphasized sufficiently the role that the manufacturing industry must play in addressing this issue. It is easy to blame our educational system for not providing competent machine operators, but can a single school system really be expected to address all the various and specific needs of such a diverse sector of the economy? Only industry itself can provide the trainers and the tools to be trained on.
Our politicians should be willing to fund and organize such a nationwide training path with subsidized industry participation. It will not work unless there is someone waiting to employ the successful trainee. And it will be cheaper than supporting an unemployed person for the rest of their lives.
Not every child should be vectored towards a four-year college. We would be better off if the marginally interested had some other form of education, and the motivated and capable students were provided better opportunities to get the advanced degrees and skill sets that the economy is demanding today.
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