How to attract manufacturing talent

The manufacturing talent gap has been widely reported upon—a Deloitte paper, “Creating pathways for tomorrow’s workforce today,” published last year highlighted that more than 2 million North American manufacturing jobs will go unfilled by 2030.

This leaves manufacturers in a perilous position, struggling to hire the talent to keep pace with the rapid, ongoing digital transformation in the industry. Most of the 800 manufacturers surveyed in the Deloitte report referred to the talent battle as a barrier, with 77 per cent thinking they will continue to have trouble hiring and keeping employees in 2022 and beyond.

Education and training for a broad set of skills is a pivotal cornerstone in addressing the talent gap issue. If done properly, it gives employees a chance to grow and develop their skills while fitting into the modern workforce mentality of wanting more than just one specific skill set. You may entice people who might not otherwise apply for open positions by offering a comprehensive learning and development program as well as on-the-job training.

A new way of approaching employment has arrived and manufacturers need to get up to speed. We must accept that while the aim is to retain employees for as long as possible, it is unrealistic to expect many years of service. So, how can manufacturers get workers up to speed quickly to avoid issues when they leave? Training.

Creating a New Manufacturing Workforce

To find answers, we need to start by looking on a broader, society-wide scale. Ideally, more vocational education would exist for adults, more instruction focused on manufacturing would be provided at the high school level, and incentives for factory apprenticeship employment would start immediately after graduation as an alternative to college.

All of these are intended to raise the minimum standard of proficiency in learning how to use factory equipment and software and in developing an intuitive sense of what is good or bad in a manufacturing environment. They are also meant to inspire more people to actually choose manufacturing as a career.

As of now, the results of the attempts to attract people to manufacturing are not bearing fruit. When respondents from the Deloitte study, previously cited, were asked about employee well-being, they said the industry is falling short in the areas of work/life balance and attractive income. Even if the proficiencies are there, the industry must do more to improve the image of factory work.

In terms of some elemental microsolutions, there are three main initiatives which are fairly ubiquitous in manufacturing at the moment:

1. Arrange for workers to be sponsored for academic degrees or certifications (meant to increase their baseline level of skill rather than company-specific skill)

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

Most firms believe that it takes the average production engineer or factory floor worker two to three years to become accustomed to all the demands of daily work on their own. It takes at least five years to develop the knowledge necessary to solve problems as they arise.

3. Have staff members study the operations manuals and perhaps take a test on them before allowing them to operate in production. However, not everyone follows this practice.

Although each of these initiatives has value in its own way, none can ensure that a relatively inexperienced worker, or even an experienced one, will be able to identify or know how to troubleshoot a problem in the moment or understand and carry out all the steps required to run a new product on the line. For these situations, real-time training, rather than depending on employees to recollect their training under time constraints, is vital.

Specific Areas of Training

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

Technical training. This helps workers become comfortable with operating production hardware and software, including user interfaces, while gaining intuition for what kinds of settings can lead to scrap or poor-quality parts. While this training requires reinforcement, it also shows that the organization is a location to learn transferrable skills.

Specialized skills. These should be emphasized more because they are unique to the production line. They may include the best machine settings based on the product being manufactured or the most frequent reasons for production problems. Because of their distinctiveness, these skills need specialized expertise to perform properly, which is problematic when individuals frequently change employment. Supplying this training in real time is the best way to operate effectively even with worker turnover and makes it possible for more people to gain the skills for working in the factory.

More businesses are starting to collect data using new sensors and transmit it via the cloud. Frontline workers should, at the very least, become more comfortable with the measurements made by various sensors, the sensors’ failure modes, and the implications of those failure modes for the factory. For example, if a sensor is damaged by high temperature, this indicates either a need to move the sensor or improve temperature regulation.

While imparting these transferable skills within the manufacturing space, employers need to communicate the pathways they are creating for employees to grow. And factories should consider including incentives for employees that can develop resolutions from problems they identify on the factory floor.

Whatever training manufacturers adopt, there needs to be a collective marketing push to get young people to see manufacturing as exciting, innovative, and socially valuable. At the moment, many young people believe manufacturing executives are running their businesses in a stagnant way, with minimal internal innovation capability. Let’s change this dynamic by ushering in the next generation of talented employees with adequate training in place.

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