There are many bullish reports and articles on reshoring proliferating the B2B media, but hold those alongside the many reports and articles expressing manufacturing’s concerns over lack of skilled workers, and you see one big reason why a reshoring success could be hampered.
A newly released study, Accenture 2014 Manufacturing Skills and Training Study, continued the mantra that a “shortage of skilled talent exists in the manufacturing industry, and this shortage is likely to become more severe in the coming years.” To add to the severity of the situation, respondents to Accenture’s survey reveal that there are almost no “unskilled” jobs left in manufacturing anymore. Thirty-five percent of the respondents surveyed said that 35% of the jobs at their plant are “highly skilled” and another 45% are “skilled.” Only 20% are considered “unskilled.”
More than 75% of the respondents reported having a moderate to severe shortage of skilled resources and over 80% of manufacturers report a moderate to severe shortage of highly skilled manufacturing resources. Welders are specifically in high demand, but even an entry-level welder “must master basic trigonometry, geometry, metallurgy and blueprint reading” noted the Accenture report. Skilled welders command between $40,000-$70,000 in annual salary, said Accenture.
Yet, I know a welder who goes to the gas and oil fields of North Dakota and works for six months (April through September), and earns more than $100,000. He returns to Phoenix in the fall and spends the winters here in Phoenix working at his passion as a tattoo artist. Not a bad gig for a 30-something guy with a high school education.
With the graying of the American mol maker (an NTMA report put the average age of a “tool and die maker” at 52), companies are going to be hard-pressed to find replacements for their journeymen moldmakers. A good moldmaker can’t be trained in a year. Many companies lament to me the loss of that “tribal knowledge” that is so critical to the success of the business.
As more OEMs reshore their manufacturing and the workload increases, having enough skilled employees to handle all this reshored work will be an ongoing problem. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported last week on Otis Elevator that relocated its manufacturing from Nogales, Mexico to Florence, SC, to a vacant Maytag facility (after that work was relocated to Mexico after Whirlpool’s purchase of Maytag a number of years ago).
The WSJ noted that Otis, a United Technologies Corp. division, couldn’t get up and running as fast as it had anticipated. While there were a number of changes Otis was making to its corporate infrastructure and admitted to the WSJ that it perhaps was “trying to do too much at once,” Otis conceded that “the bigger hurdle was putting together the necessary work force.”
Lack of a ready and skilled workforce stalled Otis’s plans and delayed the closing of the Nogales facility until the plant in South Carolina could come on-stream.
Accenture comments in its report that “Companies can maintain productivity and sustain profitability by building a talent supply chain with the needed skills to fuel growth, and then developing and retaining the skilled talent over time.”
While the Accenture survey showed that 80% of respondents reported some type of training program beyond informal training, U.S. manufacturing has obviously fallen way behind in formal technical training and apprenticeship programs. Many companies are just beginning to develop this type of “talent supply chain” suggested by Accenture.
“Companies that are successfully addressing the manufacturing skills shortage are spending training dollars wisely with a multi-tiered strategy to deal with the issue over short-, medium- and long-term timeframes,” Accenture’s report states. “Survey respondents are using a variety of training methods – from informal job shadowing types of programs to formal apprenticeships with structured curricula, testing and outside training-the help build critical skills among talent.”
The plastics industry offers a wide range of opportunities in technical and trade skills, and the work has only just begun to educate young people as to the value of gaining skills in manufacturing. Reshoring of manufacturing will only be as successful as the people we train to meet the demands of industry when lands on our shores.
Source Article from http://www.plasticstoday.com/blogs/New-report-shows-skills-shortages-are-major-threat-to-strong-performance-160512
