Workforce development is starting to become one of the most prominent themes in the mainstream news cycle. While this may seem like a sudden emergence, it’s in fact a story that has long been bubbling under the surface, which now appears to have hit critical mass.

Those who follow the U.S. manufacturing sector know this: for years, analysts have been warning of a growing shortage in U.S. blue collar workers, with one recent study claiming that the nation could see almost 2 million manufacturing jobs unfilled by 2033, in lieu of major policy changes. Earlier this year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stated that there were already almost 500,000 open manufacturing jobs.

Much of this has to do with an aging workforce and decades of underinvestment in American manufacturing. However, that only explains why the openings are there in the first place: the fact that the openings are so hard to fill is a more complicated issue. Underinvestment is a big part of that explanation, as well, but that doesn’t mean that the answer is as simple as throwing money at the problem.

One main reason for that is because, in a nation where the trades have been de-emphasized for so long, there’s a serious “lack of scalable staffing infrastructure” capable of matching prospective hires with the companies that are demanding talent. Alexander Daniels Global (ADG), an Industry 4.0 recruitment agency with extensive experience working with companies in the U.S. and Europe, is a rare example of an organization whose mission is precisely suited to help advanced manufacturing companies find new talent.

The team at MakerVerse. ADG helped the company grow from 2 employees to 40 within 18 months. Image courtesy of MakerVerse via ADG

Nick Pearce, ADG’s co-founder and CEO, shared with me some invaluable firsthand insight concerning why it’s so difficult to address the specific kinds of positions that remain so persistently understaffed in U.S. additive manufacturing (AM). First off, it’s important to point out which jobs Pearce views the U.S. AM industry as being in the most urgent need of:

“For quite some time now, we’ve seen that the key roles in-demand across AM and the broader advanced manufacturing ecosystem are hands-on jobs like machine operators and technicians: so for AM, the workers required to run the printers or take parts off the machines and finish them, whether it’s for polymer or metal. A lot of these are entry-level positions, and I think that’s where AM contract manufacturers and service bureaus in the U.S. have the biggest pain points,” said Pearce.

“If we look beyond those jobs, the businesses in contract manufacturing are still steadily hiring for sales roles, although they seem to be leaning more towards hires that have experience in relevant verticals like aerospace, medical, etc., as opposed to pulling from within the AM labor pool. But generally, the entry-level, skilled blue collar jobs are the most challenging to recruit for, and I think that trend is only going to intensify.”

With that in mind, I asked Pearce if he sees this as evidence that the “impending” manufacturing labor shortage is no longer impending:

“I think that shortage is already very much a reality,” Pearce responded. “And especially with nations like the U.S. aiming to reshore manufacturing supply chains, I think it’s going to be a challenge for the U.S. economy for the next five years, and possibly even for the next decade.”

One of the challenges for a company like ADG is the gap that exists in the manufacturing sector between workforce development programs and hiring agencies. Of course, manufacturing isn’t the only area of the economy where this challenge exists, but there are examples in other industries where successful business models have evolved precisely to address that challenge.

As Pearce explained to me, that model, referred to as “Recruit-Train-Deploy” or “Hire-Train-Deploy”, has been extremely effective in industries like data science:

“Ultimately, the most value that a professional training organization can provide for someone is to find them a job at the end of their training,” Pearce began. “I’ve seen examples where companies that have been established to do exactly that will speak to an investment bank, for instance, that needs to quickly hire 20 data scientists. The training organization will go out and find 20 people who want to work in data science, put them through an intensive boot camp over a 12 week or so period, knowing that they already have a place for those newly trained workers at the end of the process.“

The challenge for scaling this type of model in the manufacturing sector is that training workers is capital-intensive, and manufacturing already tends to be far more capital-intensive than white collar jobs:

“The companies making money by training and deploying workers in other industries are paid based on outcomes, so they don’t start making money until the workers have actually been placed,” Pearce said. “To my knowledge, this isn’t being done yet in AM and advanced manufacturing on any large scale.

“It would be a risky business model, but I do think if some organization put this type of program together and got the right funding, and went to the major employers, the big aerospace companies, defense primes, etc., and said, we’ve developed a training course, we’re going to recruit and train all these technicians, and the big manufacturing operations just need to commit to taking them, I think the AM industry would greatly benefit from that.”

Pearce is definitely onto something, and one organization he mentioned during our conversation, ASTM, already appears to be in the process of developing this type of system through various partnerships involving both the U.S. Navy and Nikon Advanced Manufacturing, as well as EOS. There’s also the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing (ATDM) program in Danville, Virginia — another initiative involving the U.S. Navy — which trains workers in five different 16-week courses.

Image courtesy of ATDM

Nevertheless, for those types of endeavors to scale successfully, I think the U.S. is going to need increased, sustained public policy backing, especially in areas outside the defense sector. As I mentioned in a recent post on the latest Fed rate cut’s implications for manufacturers, Fed Chair Jerome Powell noted that a crackdown on immigrant workers is leading to higher unemployment in the U.S.. He also commented that, in terms of AI’s most immediate effects on the labor market, it seems to be having the greatest negative impact for the sorts of entry-level jobs that usually go to new college graduates, suggesting that Gen Z is the demographic currently at greatest risk from AI in terms of employment prospects.

Public policy alone can’t solve those problems, but they are textbook cases of the type of structural issues that can’t be solved without at least some significant public sector involvement. Pearce said he’s encouraged by the increasing interest he sees in vocational training, and that, in this context, aligning the interests between trainers, recruiters, and employers is a proper role for government:

“When you think about how much it costs for an undergrad degree, I don’t know that I would necessarily be advocating for my 14-year-old son to go to university, unless he was determined to pursue a career that really required it. I think this increased focus on vocational careers is a positive thing and I’d like to see it continue.

“Advanced manufacturing and AM should be front and center for that technical training approach in an economy like the U.S.’s, where there’s a drive to reshore manufacturing. In your early 20s, you can realistically be earning a very good salary with a practical career, with the potential for upward trajectory, and, at least at this point, seems to have a better chance of standing the test of time against AI than most of the careers that currently require a college degree.”

The team at Aibuild, for which ADG helped hire the U.S. sales team. Image courtesy of Aibuild via ADG

Pearce referenced recent comments by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who said that, “The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom. You’re going to have to be doubling and doubling and doubling every single year.”

Meanwhile, in a recent interview, the CEO of Ford wondered, “How can we reshore all this stuff if we don’t have people to work there?” And, after the Trump administration’s recent, much-maligned ICE raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, the president connected the incident directly to workforce development: “If you don’t have people in this country right now that know about batteries, maybe we should help them along…So, we’re going to look at that whole situation. We have a lot of industries that we don’t have anymore, and we’re going to have to train people.”

Pearce mentioned that, understandably, it’s still quite difficult for ADG to place people without any AM experience at all into the type of technician jobs that the industry needs most. On the other hand, there are special cases where individuals have transferable skills from industries unrelated to manufacturing, but which involve relevant strengths:

“There could be someone with a practical background in some form of machine maintenance: people who understand how machines work can be trained relatively quickly. We recently placed someone who previously worked as a tattoo artist into a role in post-processing for a 3D printing contract manufacturer, for example.

“In that role, what the employers needed was someone with a strong eye for detail, and a steady hand — you’re taking intricate parts off of a machine and cleaning away powder from tight spaces, and it needs patience, precision, those sorts of assets. In that case, it’s a very entry-level role, and the individual was able to be trained and brought up to speed within a couple of weeks.

“So I think if you have a combination of those sorts of candidates, and accelerated training programs, you can probably start to get new people into the industry within 3 to 6 months. That’s where I think we need greater collaboration between the companies that need new workers, hiring agencies, and training programs that have a proven ability to upskill workers.”

There are virtually endless moving parts involved; there’s little time to waste, and there needs to be cooperation between powerbrokers from multiple social spheres. Success almost certainly won’t happen because of just one solution, but instead will likely be the result of a combination of many different approaches, some of which will probably have to be invented from scratch. Something Pearce kept going back to was the need for more hands-on training methods:

“What’s missing in a lot of the training out there is a lack of practical experience. The earlier that people can get hands-on experience with the necessary machines and technology, the easier it will be to develop the workforce on a broad scale.”

If companies in the AM industry can figure out how to systematically lean more in that direction, I think that workforce development can be transformed from a weakness into one of the industry’s greatest advantages.

Featured image courtesy of ADG

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Powering the Manufacturing Workforce: Nick Pearce of Alexander Daniels on the 3D Printing Labor Pool

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