Training Gap Faces U.S. Manufacturing

Created on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 17:55

Written by John Farrell

On Monday, I was at MIT for the second of four regional meetings that the White House asked Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, to host in order to get feedback from business leaders, academics and State and Federal government officials on how best to improve the nation’s manufacturing base.

Hockfield and Liveris run the steering committee for the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) , which President Obama kicked off earlier this year.

Hockfield opened the meeting in the morning, with a Federal Government panel including the heads of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Department of Energy.

The good news the AMP committee presented is the improvement over the past few years in manufacturing job growth.

But the more somber news, in the longer trend, shows the arrows pointing in the other direction. Ten years ago, according to the official conference briefing document, the U.S. “enjoyed a trade surplus in advanced technology manufactured goods. Today, that category accounts for an $81 billion annual trade deficit, meaning that we are buying back technologies that, in many cases, we invented.”

The AMP hopes to help business leaders and state economic agencies reverse that trend. And two more meetings are planned over the next few months to target and encourage investment in new technologies that can generate long-term domestic manufacturing jobs.

I won’t go into the whole conference schedule, which can be found at the MIT site here, but I was most interested in the first afternoon panel, Advanced Manufacturing Success Stories, chaired by Karen Mills of the Small Business Administration.

The video of the panel is here. Unfortunately missing from the serialized footage segments are the questions from the teachers and business leaders from the floor.

One academic, for example, brought up the observation that public high schools no longer teach shop classes.

That may not sound like a big deal, but I think it is: at a key developmental stage in their education, we are not encouraging our kids to work with their hands. However useful short term programs to help businesses train local workers to work on promising technologies right now, we are going to be haunted by the specter of graduating more Americans who just don’t have the exposure to science, technology, engineering and mathematics the U.S. will need for long-term competitiveness in high-tech manufacturing.

I got in touch with two of the panelists, afterwards, to follow up on this.

Michael Casper, the CEO of UltraSource, Inc., in New Hampshire, which specializes in Thin Film Manufacturing Services, said the AMP’s goal of helping to provide training solutions to companies that have an urgent need for qualified specialists is important, but it wasn’t enough.

“In the short term, we have nowhere near enough capable workers in the U.S., so we have limited options,” he said. “We must therefore fight to find the best employees we can and help them improve through training and feedback. This is a place for community colleges and local schools to help out and it represents a great opportunity for industry and academia to collaborate. The faster we can do this the better.”

But for the future, he went on, the country needs to get its fiscal house in order, “and put a lot of new practices in play that will support real sales growth or we will continue to see our national financial security erode. K-12 and college education curricula need to speak to the criticality of jobs and real sales growth as a means of supporting our country. This is a big area that has to be thought out — no silver bullets here that I can think of.”

Jill Becker is CEO of Cambridge NanoTech, which specializes in the delivery of multiple-application ultra thin films created by Atomic Layer Deposition, a branch of chemistry she mastered while working toward her Ph.D. at Harvard. Most of the highly-skilled people her company requires have advanced degrees.

But even for high tech manufacturers that don’t require Ph.Ds from their technicians, training is a big issue. Of course, companies can pay to get the workforce they need, she said, “but they would have to pay them more [than offshore technicians], which would cut into their bottom line, and not make them competitive.”

“Who makes technicians these days? I mean, I was shocked that there are no shop classes anymore in high school,” she said.

And to hear from MIT professors that they’re getting students who’ve never picked up a soldering iron? “I just don’t know what to say about that.” Coming from Germany as a child, Becker was used to a society where technical schools were as respectable as the major universities.

“Bring back the shop classes,” she said. “We make gym mandatory; make shop class mandatory.” Not so much so people can fix their own cars, but so that teachers and administrators can discover the students who have an aptitude for craftsmanship–who can go on to become the future home-grown innovators the U.S. economy needs. Otherwise, domestic firms will remain dependent on imported specialists.

“And how can you guarantee that they won’t leave?” she said.

When a questioner from the floor asked Becker whether she would be outsourcing her manufacturing overseas five years from now, she was blunt. “We will be manufacturing here in Massachusetts…otherwise I won’t be running the company anymore.”

SOURCE: Forbes.com