When The Workforce Clocks Out...

There have been lots of studies and reports in the media over the years about the ageing workforce and the need to replace it, but these largely came before the current economic crisis, and the competition for scarcer resources for investment. Yet this could be one of the biggest obstacles to manufacturing recovery unless it's confronted very soon and on the right scale. We can talk about productivity until we're blue in the face, but productivity rates presuppose that there'll be enough workers in the factory in the first place.

A third of workers with science or engineering degrees are likely to retire within 15 years at the latest, a demographic sucker punch that's going to be very hard to avoid, and that could knock out hopes to rebuild capacity for good. We can't wait until this fact swaggers across the ring. It's not much of a consolation that the consequences of China's One Child policy will hit it even harder at the same time. Because the figure refers to the highly qualified. There's also all the skilled workers who will quit at a similar time if they can afford it.

Now let's step back and look at where the replacements for all these people are going to come from. The younger generation has been sold the idea (by our generation) that the service sector and IT are the future, and they're now finding out that this argument was fundamentally flawed because new jobs could never have been provided at the same rate that manufacturing was allowed to lose them. There are probably still in some places the equivalents of the record-breaking Arfan brothers, but the change in culture to individualised consumerism and 'Get Rich Quick' celebrity-status chasing is profound. Many young people have more smartphones than smart ideas, and equate 'tools' with IT applications. Most think a torque wrench is a form of whiplash. They think a feel for materials is something you can develop in a fashion store. They can't walk round an old shed full of wood and steel offcuts because their sneakers will get dirty. Many have turned the word 'respect' into an existential diversion from their total failure in high school. Okay, I'm half-joking, but you get the picture.

So we also have to re-create a desire in young people to make things, to want to invent, to physically change the world around them for the better. And the current obsession with IT in schools, on imported, expensive and endlessly upgraded equipment, with ever-expanding and costly IT network support staff, seems to have no role in that at all. For every computer you could have a real tool and a corner in a workshop to make something. You need to get your hands dirty, make mistakes and learn the benefits of accurate measurement the hard way. That's how you get young people interested in making things again. They all have computers in their bedrooms now- what's the point of having one at school? Cutting and pasting from Google isn't thinking, and it isn't a real education. You can't cut and paste the skill to make a good 90 degree cut in wood or metal with a saw. It takes practise and excellent hand/eye co-ordination. Which you can't get from a mouse and a keyboard. Getting sufficient numbers of kids back into the right frame of mind to want to be useful in a factory, and to regain a sense that real self-esteem can come from 'doing a good job,' will take a couple of years. At the earliest.

Now it takes 3-4 years to get a good science or engineering degree. Then it takes several years to find your feet in a job, if you can find the job in the first place, before you can really make an impact on innovation and product development. That's a minimum of 7 years before there could be even relatively inexperienced replacements ready to learn from the workforce before they clock out for good. So you have to subtract that from the 15 years, and you get about 7-8 years to make a difference and avoid the sucker punch. But as we true believers in manufacturing agree, unless we act decisively soon current manufacturing capacity isn't going to be there to give them those jobs when they can start making a difference. So we have to invest in manufacturing now to give them the chance to take it forward.

To put in place a manufacturing workforce replacement scheme could take another couple of years. So overall it looks to me like we've got a lot less than five years to make a difference. In fact, if things aren't underway inside this current Presidential term, there may not be enough time, or resources, in the next one. Manufacturing is not Hollywood. Unless we get moving quickly, there might be no happy ending to this one and we may get counted out. Let's hope our corner men are good enough.

(This Blog was first published on Manufacturing Crunch's site on Aug 14th at www.mfgcrunch.ning.com)