There are some jobs now in manufacturing. Kids just aren’t interested in taking them.

The Washington Post May 15, 2014

By Lydia Depills

A couple weeks ago, Daniel Grigg had two problems with the career fair he hosted at Guilford Technical Community College, where it's his job to get graduates on payrolls.

The first problem was theoretically a good one: He literally did not have enough space to host the number of factories with open positions for machinists, welder, and technicians. The second, though, has proved harder to solve: He doesn't have enough people equipped to fill them.

"It kind of gets frustrating when I see the machinists ones because, I'm like, I only have nine of them graduating," Grigg says. And the other categories aren't looking much better. He just hasn't been able to get students interested in factory jobs, which still exist around Greensboro, N.C., despite the area's vastly diminished manufacturing economy.

"I think if they knew more about them, they would be, because the money's amazing," Grigg says of the jobs available to those with an industrial construction technology degree -- with pay starting at around $40,000, not bad for suburban North Carolina. "Most will graduate and make more than I will. It's sad because it's so cheap, like four-grand, to get your degree. With my master's degree, I'll be paying it off forever."

But why has it been so hard to get students -- both young and old -- to act in their own financial self-interest? Well, Grigg says, manufacturing jobs just don't sound that glamorous. "They want to do what you're doing right now, or they want to be engineers," he says. "I think part of it is a misconception of what manufacturing looks like in 2014, and I think there's still a stigma about community colleges."

Somebody's going to have to change their minds if this very nascent manufacturing recovery in the United States is to continue. What Grigg described is part of what's often called the "skills gap," with today's workers ill-equipped to take the jobs available in the recently resurgent industry. But it might more accurately be called an "interest gap," if people don't feel compelled to supply the demand.

In northeastern Wisconsin, a bunch of companies have joined together to try to change that. It started in 2006, when people like Andy Bushmaker -- a human resources manager at KI Furniture, which does some $700 million in sales annually -- started to have trouble filling jobs, especially the seasonal ones that turn into permanent positions down the road.

"The problem is that we have a lot of retirements and an incoming workforce that doesn't necessarily have an interest in manufacturing," says Bushmaker, who hires more than 200 people per year for his busiest period. He has 30 permanent workers between the ages of 60 and 69 at his Green Bay plant whom he'll need to replace -- the average welder nationally is 55 years old -- and he says it took him nine months to fill the last spot he had open for a tool-and-die worker.

"I think there's an overall stigma about manufacturing in general. Manufacturing isn't what it was 20 years ago, and there's this idea that it's a dirty and dark profession." (Also, the area isn't exactly desperate; unemployment is below the national average at 6.2 percent.)

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