How to attract manufacturing talent

The manufacturing talent gap has been widely reported – a Deloitte paper, “Creating Pathways for Tomorrow’s Workforce Today,” published last year, highlighted that more than 2 million North American manufacturing jobs will remain unfilled by 2030 .

This puts manufacturers in a dangerous position as they struggle to hire the talent to keep up with the rapid, ongoing digital transformation in the industry. Most of the 800 manufacturers surveyed in the Deloitte report identified the struggle for talent as an obstacle, with 77 percent believing they will continue to struggle hiring and retaining employees in 2022 and beyond.

Education and training across a wide range of skills is a critical cornerstone to addressing the talent gap. When done right, it gives employees the opportunity to grow and develop their skills while fitting into the modern work mindset of wanting more than just one skill. You can attract people who might not otherwise apply for open positions by offering a comprehensive learning and development program and on-the-job training.

There is a new approach to employment and manufacturers need to update. We have to accept that while the goal is to retain employees for as long as possible, expecting many years of service is unrealistic. So how can manufacturers quickly bring their employees up to speed to avoid problems when they leave the company? Education.

Creation of a new workforce for production

To find answers, we must first look at a broader, society-wide level. Ideally, there would be more vocational training for adults, more manufacturing-focused instruction at the high school level, and incentives for factory apprenticeships to begin immediately after graduation as an alternative to college.

All of this is designed to raise the minimum standard of skill in learning how to use factory equipment and software and developing an intuitive sense of what is good and bad in a manufacturing environment. They should also inspire more people to actually choose a career in manufacturing.

So far, the results of attempts to attract people to production have not borne fruit. When asked about employee wellbeing from the aforementioned Deloitte study, respondents said the industry is lagging behind in the areas of work-life balance and attractive income. While the skills are there, industry needs to do more to improve the image of factory work.

In terms of some elementary micro-solutions, there are three main initiatives that are pretty ubiquitous in manufacturing right now:

1. Encourage workers to be sponsored for degrees or certifications (so that their basic skill level is raised rather than the company specific skill level)

2. Provide initial training on equipment, safety procedures, production processes, and standard operating procedures, and then update that training every six to 12 months or when those procedures change significantly.

Most companies believe that it takes the average production engineer or factory worker two to three years to get used to all the demands of day-to-day work. It takes at least five years to develop the knowledge needed to solve problems that arise.

3. Have employees study the operations manuals and perhaps take a test before allowing them to work on the shop floor. However, not everyone follows this practice.

While each of these initiatives is valuable in its own way, none can ensure that a relatively inexperienced employee, or even an experienced employee, will be able to spot or fix a problem in the moment, or understand and perform all the steps needed to create a new one running product on the line. In these situations, real-time training is critical, rather than relying on time-pressed employees to remember their training.

Specific training areas

There are two main types of training to be aware of:

technical training. This helps employees become familiar with the operation of production hardware and software, including user interfaces, while developing a sense of what types of settings can result in scrap or poor-quality parts. While this training requires reinforcement, it also demonstrates that the organization is a place where transferrable skills can be acquired.

Special Abilities. These should be given more prominence as they are unique to the production line. They can include the best machine settings based on the product being manufactured or the most common causes of production problems. Because of their specificities, these skills require specific expertise to function properly, which is problematic when people change jobs frequently. Delivering this real-time training is the best way to work effectively even with employee turnover and allows more people to gain the skills to work in the factory.

More and more companies are starting to collect data with new sensors and transmit it via the cloud. At a minimum, frontline workers should familiarize themselves with the measurements of various sensors, the failure modes of the sensors, and the impact of those failure modes on the factory. For example, if a sensor is damaged by high temperatures, this indicates that either the sensor needs to be moved or the temperature control needs to be improved.

In teaching these transferable skills on the shop floor, employers need to communicate the pathways they are creating to enable employees to grow. And factories should consider including incentives for employees who can develop solutions to problems they identify on the factory floor.

Whatever training providers take on, there needs to be a collective marketing push to get young people to see manufacturing as exciting, innovative and socially valuable. Right now, many young people believe that manufacturing executives run their companies in a stagnant manner, with minimal internal innovation capacity. Let’s change this dynamic by introducing the next generation of talented employees with proper education.

Arjun Chandar is the Founder/CEO of IndustrialML, 2599 SW 105th Terrace, Davie, Florida, 33324, 857-529-9656, industrialml.com.