Is There A Lean Employee Deficit?

Two recent articles in respected manufacturing publications highlighted a topic of interest for us at Ultriva: The difficulty of finding and retaining manufacturing talent.

The first was an article from the American Society for Quality published last week in Reliable Plant about the aggressive luring of Lean manufacturing experts to the services sector. The article quotes Jack Stiles, the president of an executive search firm, that experts are enjoying 20 to 30% pay raises to take their Lean thinking from manufacturing to service industries, like Healthcare or Banking. A Bain executive, Mark Gottfredson, adds "There is a whole industry luring away Toyota and General Electric people".

Then today, Industry Week's Traci Purdum published a piece online entitled "Help Wanted". The article looks at the difficulty manufacturer's are having in filling jobs from the plant to the management suite.

While each looks at different segments of the work force, both address the same problem: skilled labor shortages. This isn't news to us. We've been hearing it from our customers.

While you might think we look at this as a great opportunity, you'd only be half-right. Sure, automation helps companies reduce their need for labor and we're in the automation business, but skilled labor is required to identify the problems and prescribe solutions, like Lean production, for which automation is the answer. It's in our best interests, naturally, for our customers to stay in business and it takes the right talent to do that.

So what's the problem? Why is the manufacturing sector having a tough time attracting and retaining talent.

The American Society for Quality thinks Lean implementation failures might be to blame, while Purdum places much of the blame on industry image.

Well... they probably both have a point, but we think the image problem is the greater of the two. Let's face it -- if you've grown up in the last 40 years, you haven't heard many stories about the golden era of American manufacturing. This despite the fact that pockets of industry have provided tremendous rewards to many firms' shareholders and employees.

To address the issue, it's going to take a pretty darn good marketing effort, as well as some targeted hiring. Purdum's article cites the company ATS, who focuses recruiting efforts on ex-military personnel. That's a great solution for that company, but the manufacturing industry as a whole will have to start younger to change its image if it wants to avoid future employee deficits.

Kids who don't want a college degree but do want a skilled job need exposure to manufacturing industry opportunities early. Same with engineers. While many engineers will change focus during college, industry perception might make it tough to get them thinking about that particular sector. Better PR is needed. We know this is a tall order, but it will have to be addressed or the industry-at-large could face a worker-deficit, in which case, no one wins.