Workforce Challenges for Manufacturers

Brad Netzel, CPA   email
Auditing & Accounting Senior Manager
December 2011

If your company is like many others in the manufacturing industry in Wisconsin, you may be finding yourself looking at your current workforce and wondering how you are going to replace the knowledge and experience of your older employees. As retirement begins to get closer for many baby boomers, employers are finding themselves looking for ways to attract and retain younger employees.  However, the trend appears that fewer people are seeking careers in manufacturing compared to historical levels.  This issue, and how your company is trying to address it, should be a main topic of conversation at your management meetings.

In the past several months, I have heard a consistent theme from many companies within the manufacturing arena - the lack of skilled new hires is prohibiting growth. With the national unemployment rate still above 9 percent and the Milwaukee region unemployment above 8 percent, it can be hard to imagine that companies are struggling to fill staffing needs.  The problem is not the lack of applicants; it is that the applicants do not have the necessary qualifications to fill the available positions. 

On October 26, 2011, a workshop on this topic was hosted by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC), Waukesha County Business Alliance (WCBA) and Milwaukee 7 and cosponsored by Kolb+Co. and Caterpillar. The goal of the event was to bring manufacturing companies and educators together to discuss the manufacturing skills gap and start brainstorming solutions for the problem. To provide background on how large this issue is, and can become, many statistics were shared with the group.  (To view the full presentation, click here.)  Those that stood out the most are listed below.

• 600,000 skilled manufacturing positions across the country remain unfilled.
• Over 5,600 production positions remain unfilled in the Milwaukee Region.
• 2.7 million manufacturing employees are 55 years of age or older and likely to retire in the next 10 years.
• Among 18-24 year olds, manufacturing ranks last among industries they would chose to start their careers.

The workshop was full of dialogue on how each company is handling their staffing needs and programs educators have developed to meet the skill requirements of area employers.  However, one item became clear – there are a lot of programs that have been created to help with the problem, but awareness of these programs is lacking. Companies that used one or more of these programs seemed to have more success obtaining new employees with the necessary skills than those that tried to find new employees on their own. Below is a table of the various programs, with contact information, that were discussed during the workshop. If you have a need for a skilled manufacturing workforce and are struggling to fill your open positions, I would suggest reaching out to these programs to see if partnering with them may be a viable option for you.