The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte are reporting that U.S. manufacturers will soon experience an even greater skills gap crisis than originally thought: Approximately two million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2025, which is only 10 years from now.
The study was based on interviews with 450 manufacturing executives and is an elaboration of an earlier Institute/Deloitte study showing 600,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs in 2011. Two big factors include the acceleration retirement rates of current manufacturing workers and an anticipated expansion of manufacturing in the U.S. projected over the next several years. The report concluded that 2.7 million new workers will be needed to replace retiring workers, and another 700,000 to meet the needs of “natural business growth.”
Based upon estimates of surveyed executives, about 60 percent of the manufacturing jobs remain unfilled today because of a shortage of applicants with the requisite skills. Thus the authors anticipate that two million of the projected 3.4 million manufacturing jobs that come online by 2025 will be unfilled because of the skills gap. The report concludes that manufacturers have to take aggressive action by fostering internal training programs and become directly involved with local high schools, trade schools and community colleges to help foster potential candidates.