Manufacturing Month Special: Addressing the skills gap on the shop floor

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

Robert Schoenberger: I'd like to start with you, Jen. Could you tell us a little bit about Manufacturing Day, some of the history, and what you're expecting to see this year?

Jen White: Yeah, absolutely. We're really excited. We’ve been doing a lot of work for the last several months to really get prepared and get as much involvement in MFG Day as we can. So, a little history. Manufacturing Day, or as we call it, MFG day, was first held in 2012, and it was held on the first Friday in October.

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And it was really an effort in the Midwest to get students in front of manufacturing to show them what it really looks like. And from there, it's just kind of continued, evolved. And so we're on year 12 now, and The Manufacturing Institute now leads MFG Day. Our goal is really to empower manufacturers and their partners across the country to plan and produce really impactful events for students of all ages.

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While it started primarily with doing tours of manufacturing facilities, it's really evolved now to be encompassing of many different types of events. I always say there's no one-size-fits-all. You really have to make the event work for the company, the business, the partners, and the target audience especially.

And so while we will celebrate National Manufacturing Day tomorrow, Oct. 4, which is again the first Friday in October, when we always celebrate it, that doesn't always work for student groups, for schools to do field trips, or even for the company themselves. And so we will see events happening. Some have already started. We'll see them happen all the way through the month of October into November even.

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And so The Manufacturing Institute has a national registry of events, and our website, mfgday.com, we encourage anyone who is hosting an event to register it through that website so that it appears on that national map. That then allows us to not just show all the great work that's happening across the country, you see all these pins all across the map, but it really allows us to better tell the story, too, of how the manufacturing community really comes together towards this common goal of inspiring the future manufacturing workforce. So tomorrow you're going to see lots of, again, events happening all across the country. Look at social media. We're hoping it's a true social media takeover and encourage everyone to post on their own channels, but we'll see lots of proclamations, press releases, stories in the news, spotlights of manufacturers and what they're doing today.

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RS: I'd like to turn things over to Traci because you've been doing a lot of work over in the chemical world, looking at the challenges in preparing that next generation workforce. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Traci Purdum: Yeah, we're two articles into a five-part series that we're doing on Workforce Watch just for those items that you mentioned, the skilled workforce that's leaving us, the knowledge that's leaving us. And what we're finding is it’s such a struggle to compete with other industries that are kind of poaching our skilled workforce.

Jonathan Katz, our executive editor, in his first article in the series, really illustrated that point by stating that some of these companies are having to reach out to very unskilled labor forces. He mentions they're grabbing folks from Walmart who were stocking shelves one day and then the next day they're dealing with hazardous chemicals, and that is just not the best practice to have. But they're struggling to fill those positions.

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You don't get a chemical engineer by accident. You go to school for that. You're pretty highly ambitious. So the tech industry in Silicon Valley are really kind of poaching who our industry looks to. So bigger companies are trying to combat that with programs of their own, incentives, relocation incentives, to get them interested in the companies and the industry. Also diversity aspects. You know BASF has a great program to work with women in manufacturing and really promote them in the industry and hopefully keep them longer in these roles.

What we're also finding too is that the younger workforce wants to just stay for a few years and leave, and that knowledge can never be built up. And so it's just a tough thing all the way around, and automation can maybe help supplement that, but you still need people out there. Operators are no longer just valve turners. They're diagnostic. We're looking at them for other things, too, their knowledge base. So, it's just been a real rough pull in the industry to kind of keep that knowledge, find new talent, and keep them engaged in the workforce.

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RS: I'd like to turn things over to Andrea over there in the pharmaceutical world. It seems like that would be an even bigger challenge because you're not looking for unskilled labor at all. Generally, you're talking about a lot of people with very advanced qualifications. So, what is the pharma world doing to try to address some of these challenges?

Andrea Corona: It was interesting just hearing Traci's perspective because I think there's a lot of similarities between the chemical and pharmaceutical worlds in terms of the challenges that drug makers and companies in general are facing to hold on to employees, not only for a couple of years, but just to build these long-lasting relationships. I think in conversations and the general environment seems to point to kind of life sciences-oriented language of thinking of the workforce as an ecosystem, as a labor pool, and as a living, breathing organism that needs to be fostered, cultivated, and encouraged. So in doing research about the different initiatives that drug makers are putting forth to reach out to younger workers, I’ve come across a lot of programs that target students as early as possible. So not just college and graduate programs, but even high school and middle school.

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And it's interesting because growing up in Puerto Rico, which is a huge pharmaceutical manufacturing hub, I've actually been participating in some of these programs. When I was in high school, I participated in a robotics sponsored team that was sponsored by J&J. And I was 14 or 15, and we were going through robotics practices at these sites and, from an early age, exposing people, students, to the possibilities beyond just STEM. Because, I think, with pharmaceuticals, there's this idea, at least this is the idea that I had of going into a STEM career, that you were either a researcher or a scientist or a mathematician or an engineer.

But there's a whole world of opportunities out there that not every student is aware of. So I think drug makers are trying to build bridges with local communities, local governments, students as early as possible to just get them exposed to the possibilities. And it's also a very fruitful and exciting career path for students. I think there's a lot of exciting opportunities in pharmaceuticals. Not just from the day-to-day perspective, but also in the larger picture of it.

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There's a general effort to convince students that this is meaningful work, and this is long-lasting, impacting work and that it's never too early to start asking questions and start becoming curious about it. And with that, you see initiatives such as summer programs, scholarships, incentives, internships, etc. So I think, like any other industry, the workforce is one of the biggest challenges for pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the efforts don't stop at college. They start as early as possible.