Less than five years ago:

Innovation in the manufacturing sector means that the jobs require greater skills than ever before. According to an analysis by economists Richard Deitz and James Orr at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, employment in high-skilled manufacturing jobs rose 37%, or by 1.2 million jobs, from 1983 to 2002. At the same time, low-skilled factory jobs dropped 25%, or by approximately 2 million workers.

“The time when you can be relatively unskilled and work in manufacturing for a long time with just a high school degree and make a good salary to support a family is gone,” National Association of Manufacturers chief economist David Huether says.

But finding people with the right skills isn’t easy.

“It’s limiting my growth,” says John West, president of Fox Valley Metal-Tech in Green Bay, Wis.

Earlier this year West turned down a $1.5 million contract with Kraft Foods because he didn’t have enough welders. That order would have grown his business by 10%. {…}

“Culturally, we have browbeaten manufacturing to such an extent that we don’t have people interested,” says John Sinn, interim director of the Center for Applied Technology at Bowling Green State University.

Sinn and others say it is now up to people in manufacturing to change that perception, particularly among younger people and their parents.

“Everyone wants their kids to be doctors, lawyers and dentists. … (But) all of us can’t be that,” says Lloyd McCaffrey, director of manufacturing technology at Williams International, a gas turbine manufacturer in Ogden, Utah.

My first job out of college (well, a semester away from graduating) was at Wildcat, an engineering and fabrication company. Wildcat would occasionally have some real difficulty attracting people to work in the warehouse (about 2/3 to 7/8 of the company’s workforce at any given time). A lot of that, though, had to do with constant ramp-ups and layoffs depending on the contracts. That seems to be a lot of what’s going on here. Basically, Wildcat would get some big contract and suddenly the warehouse labor force would need to double. Then, when the contract was over, about half would be laid off. There was a lot of this sort of thing going on at the industrial park where I worked. Essentially, people would make a living hopping from one job to another. In addition to the perception of fabrication work, I suspect the somewhat inconsistent nature of it also makes it less attractive than some of the alternative.

Some tasks, though, were so important and it was so hard to find people to do them that they would keep them on even when there was nothing for them to do just so that they would be there for the next ramp-up. This was particularly true of the machinists, which were less interchangeable than the welders and fitters. But even with welders it was difficult. Wildcat would have to hire non-English speakers, which creates some pretty significant logistical problems. On one major product, they basically had the English shift and the Spanish shift. Everyone was crossing their fingers and hoping that nobody would call the EEOC (the Spanish-speakers because they were stuck working overnight and the English-speakers because the Spanish-speakers were pulling in some extra off-hour money, though to be fair since everyone was working 60-hour weeks nobody was hurting for money).

In addition to the language-logistical difficulties, it also left Wildcat having to do a fair amount of training. Typically, the “relatively unskilled” would get hired on to carry stuff around or put with Assembly while they learned what they were doing. The entry-level jobs were not easy to come by, though. Nearly everyone that got in at that level was somebody’s son, step-son, or nephew. Since the aforementioned huge job required using special metals, the company had to bankroll certification for a lot of people to handle these metals. But mostly, as with so many other industries, Wildcat wanted the people to already be trained and ready to go. With comparatively little notice.