It is, by many means acute. The jobs are there, the labor force is not.
You want something a president can help with, this is it.
As the additional costs imposed by high oil prices, as well as other factors, make manufacturing jobs creep back home, we need to figure out how to meet this demand. Vocational grants?
The demand is there, and so is the loss to the economy from a lack of workers.
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Bucks and Montgomery County manufacturers are meeting Wednesday morning to talk about a key issue - after years of declines in manufacturing employment, they are facing looming shortages of highly skilled workers.
"It's a huge problem," said Lisa Christman, senior human resources director at the K'nex toy manufacturing company in Hatfield and one of the organizers of Wednesday's meeting.
Christman doesn't have to walk far from her office at K'nex to the factory floor, where injection molding machines spit out the brightly colored rods and connectors that combine to create construction-toy roller coasters and Ferris wheels.
From her vantage point, she can see some of her company's most important employees - the 18 toolmakers who create the molds that are the heart of the operation.
A third of them, she said, are within 10 years of retirement. Experienced toolmakers are hard to find and "a toolmaker takes 10 years to become proficient."
"We're not the only ones" worried about a skills gap. There are also shortages, she said, in people trained to be machinists and setup technicians.
So eager are the area's manufacturers to address the issue of a looming shortage of skilled manufacturing employees that they are forming their own grassroots group - the Bux-Mont Manufacturing Consortium. The Wednesday meeting, to be at the North Montco Technical Career Center in Lansdale, is its second.
On the agenda are discussions of how to engage trade schools in the region to build a talent pipeline and a review of existing training funding and availability through government workforce investment boards and community colleges.
The group was just beginning to galvanize last spring when the Middle Bucks Ins ute of Technology announced that it would close its precision machining program. Enrollment had dwindled to five students.
Local manufacturers rallied, unsuccessfully, to keep the program open.
In the fall, the Bucks County Workforce Investment Board chose the school to host a manufacturing job fair. Nearly every manufacturer that set up a table at the event was looking for a machinist.
Some said that they would hire a machinist even without an immediate opening, just to get them on the payroll.
K'nex toolmakers earn between $18 and $30 an hour, and must work 55 hours weekly. Even the lowest paid earns more than $1,100 a week with overtime.
"What we have to do is make sure that manufacturing jobs are attractive to parents, teachers, and students," Christman said.
http://articles.philly.com/2012-02-2...-manufacturers
Take this story and a few others.
The slight re-shoring of such jobs doesn't make a lot of mainstream news since it isn't one of those sensationalistic tidbits, but it is worth noting.
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