Closing skills gap requires commitment

The manufacturing industry is experiencing major change with the growth of Industry 4.0

Everywhere you look, from the factory floor to the customer environment, we’re seeing an explosion of connectivity, data, and opportunity.

Digitalization brings both new challenges and opportunities for manufacturers.

It's expected that millions of new manufacturing jobs will be created over the next decade with automation and digitalization playing a much larger role within the manufacturing process. Because of an aging workforce and a skills gap, too many of these jobs will go unfilled.

Closing the skills gap is good for business, the economy, and the community. Retirees take decades of skills and knowledge with them as they exit the workforce. Compounding the issue, and not as widely discussed, is that, while millennials have great digital skills, they do not have the specific technical skills that manufacturers require and, those who do, are choosing high-tech jobs outside of manufacturing.

In today's competitive market, a highly skilled workforce is necessary for continued success. If we do not immediately address the manufacturing skills gap challenge, manufacturers will certainly fall behind to global competition.

Barriers to success

Manufacturers know that a strong manufacturing industry is fundamental to their economic prosperity. Industry must find and keep qualified employees to expand and improve operations. While no single silver bullet exists that will solve the skills gap conundrum, there are issues we can tackle today.

Three main barriers to successfully solving the skills gap exist: employee pay, industry instability, and workplace environment.

Many new workers view the Silicon Valley workforce model as the wave of the future. It's all about the amenities and not just the pay. They are looking to make an impact and asking for unique perks and flexibility in their work week. Competitive salary alone is not enough to hire top talent. A change of thinking is required to compete with software companies.

Education is essential

To help ensure our manufacturing future, we need to prepare the workforce of tomorrow. Members of academia, business, and business organizations need to collaborate to create programs and find other solutions to address the skills gap.

Joseph Di Fazio of Windsor, Ont.-based Brave Control Solutions, said, “All our new hires come out of co-op programs through the University of Windsor and other universities in Ontario. These kids get a four month experience in our company. They get paid. We throw them right into jobs. They become valuable after only a month. If we can get these kids in the first year, we get them coming back the second year, third year, and fourth year. By that point we know we want to hire them. We show them the pay-scale. We show them everything. They want to come back.”

Di Fazio added that the co-op program has recently been introduced into high schools.

“We actually take high school co-ops for the summer and bring them in and get them involved in projects. We show them what the industry is about and let them go to a plant and customer sites. If they don't want to do it, that's fine, but if they never touch it, they'll never know,” he said.

Developing the workforce

Attracting new talent is certainly a high priority for manufacturers. However, companies know that their best assets are their existing highly skilled and experienced people. Because of this, they are increasing their investment in lifelong learning development and looking for new ways to ensure knowledge transfer.

Ben Kisley recently took part in Siemens Engineering Leadership Development Program.

“Every six months I move to a different location,” Kisley said. “I get experience from different parts of the organization and to learn from different people. I think that is a good idea for enticing new grads.”

Siemens also offers a Workforce Performance Improvement program (WPI), which is a well-defined six-stage cyclic program providing transparency into employee job skills for success. The program begins by aligning current worker competency to business targets and approaches the learning process from the customers’ perspective. It incorporates a variety of online and face-to-face learning methods individually tailored to improve job performance and meet specific performance needs.

Capturing information through technology and passing it to new workers can help reduce training time, improve collaboration, and communication and help companies get to market faster.