VIDEO: TOOLING UP – Addressing The U.S. Manufacturing Skills Gap

Narrator: Welcome to Tooling Up, a series by MSC Industrial Supply Company that provides real-world insights brought to you by leading industry experts and aimed at improving the efficiency and productivity of your operations.

Goettler: Welcome to MSC's Tooling Up videocast. My name is Jamie Goettler and once again I'm pleased to be joined by Dr. Tom Kurfess and Dr. Scott Smith. Both doctors are from the department of energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Gentlemen, thanks again for joining us. It's been really wonderful having you be part of our first two episodes and I'm going to summarize some of the learnings and things that we talked about. In the first episode we kind of drew a line in the sand and it was let's talk about Executive Order 13806 that was published in late 2018 and what were some of those findings. And it was found that STEM skills in the United States needed to be improved, that we were overly dependent on foreign supply chains, and that there was a number of things from a manufacturing perspective that put us in a position in the United States to not be as agile and as resilient and self-supportive as certainly we need to be. And we talked about the fact that the executive order was really positioned from a standpoint of what if a defense effort was necessary, a homeland security concern. Well, thank goodness, we didn't have that but we did have the pandemic, which wasn't much better. But the pandemic showed to us, and we talked about that in episode two, just how though the executive order was correct that we weren't in a position to make our own face shields and face masks rather than you know bullets and armaments and other things that a defense effort would be, so it proved to us that yeah those adjustments and those improvements were necessary. One of the things that was highlighted in Executive Order 13806 is certainly the skills gap, the manufacturing skills gap. Now we've all heard of it, you hear it on the news, you see updates from news outlets and from a number of different outlets on a regular basis, and we're going to spend our third episode today talking about the manufacturing skills gap. So let me start with you Dr. Smith and really how did we get to this point? What do you feel or what are some of the reasons why the manufacturing skills gap has become you know so pervasive in America?

Smith: So thanks again Jamie. You know one of the things that I'll point out is that it's not just the skills, it's the lack of the people with the skills. You know about 20 years ago it was generally a widely held perception that manufacturing jobs, manufacturing in general, was going to go to low-wage countries and we shifted from a design and build sort of a mindset, to a design and sell kind of a mindset, and we spent a generation telling people that this was not a good career choice and those people made other choices. You know, that turns out to be a bad idea. Manufacturing and innovation are inextricably linked. You can't be design and sell. Manufacturing and innovation go together. If you want to do good designs, you have to make things. We recognize that now, it's pretty clear. But, there's a gap in our workforce. You know a lot of people who had careers in manufacturing are getting close to retirement age and I guess I'm the one in this call who can say that gray hair is beautiful and I don't to say anything besides that. But realistically you know those people are nearing retirement age and they've got skills and experiences that we are about to lose. Now we do have new workers, new people coming up into manufacturing who are really smart, really data driven, and they are reflecting the fact that the character of manufacturing has changed. You know it used to be a lot of manual skills, physical labor, manual dexterity, and so on. Manufacturing has changed and it's gotten to a place where now it's a knowledge-based industry and I think our educational systems, our training paradigms, need to reflect that manufacturing in the future is a competition among brains. It's not a competition of brawn.

Goettler: Excellent Scott. Thank you for that. Dr. Kurfess, anything that you would add from your perspective to what Scott had shared about how we got to this point, anything you would add?

Kurfess: Well, I think Scott has really characterized it, you know he's right on the money there, and the only thing I would like to add is maybe pivoting towards the future. It's not just so the brains are important to manufacturing, and we see this across the board, brains are important across the board and it really is the education and the know-how and it doesn't mean that you need to go off and get a PhD, but it does mean that you need to be kept up on the current technology. I mean I don't know about you, but I look at my you know the little social security information I get every six months or so. It tells me I'm retiring, I think I'm still retiring before I'm age 70. But you know that's where it's going so if you think about it from 20 to 70, kids are going to be you know they're going to be in the workforce for 50 years. I'm a car guy or you can think machine tools but let's just think of cars. That's what people are really familiar with you know out there. Think about the car 50 years ago. I mean how the technology has changed and it's really ramping up. So yeah, so it's not just about education but the continuous education so lifelong learning and I think that this is really the direction. And by the way, not just for manufacturing but just across the board and I can tell you, you can see this. I mean you know just take a look at 13806, that executive order, it gets it. I mean people get it, the federal government understands, state governed, local, and so forth that it is that capability that's going to move us forward, you know the brains not the brawn.

Smith: I think what we've been saying is true across the whole manufacturing ecosystem right. Education is important but education is important at all levels and that means people in the high school levels, it means in the community college level, it means at the university level, you know. I think certainly one of the things that we're going to have to address is that we're in a hurry. Can we shorten the time that was traditionally required to make someone skillful in the manufacturing area? What can we do you know to compress that traditional apprenticeship model? As an example, how do we make people, how do we make knowledge that was gained in the past more readily available to the workers who need it? Just generally how do we get the information to the people who need it at the time and the place that they need it so that they can make good decisions using that information?

Kurfess: And let me just say we're not that far away. I mean I remember as a student in high school you took typing right? Now they call it keyboarding but they're also teaching things like spreadsheets and so forth. So really I mean even high school they're doing things like Excel and standard deviations and averages. They know how to do that well. Hey guess what? That's the X bar and NS charts that you have in production, so some of those skills are there we just need to let them pivot and say, yeah this is how you use it out in manufacturing. So you know we're not starting from ground zero. There's a lot that we can tie into to really make us move forward.

Goettler: Yeah guys, there's a lot of work that's been done and it's in the process of being done so you know what we just explored is you know how we got here and even touched on some of the things that can fix it, but in terms of responding you know to the manufacturing skills gap, you know it seems to boil down to really you know two things. It's upskilling people and what I think is interesting is we do talk a lot, we hear a lot about you know the younger generations learning about manufacturing, but there's also some continuous learning for our manufacturing customers that are in the business today and I think that there's this new generation and future generations that can be involved in manufacturing, but there's also this notion of industry 4.0 and productivity improvements that can really help to close the gap as well. And Scott, I'm wondering if you wouldn't take a moment to talk about you know how you view productivity as it relates to the skills gap.

Smith: Sure. So you know productivity is important if you want to be competitive in the global environment. If there's a wage difference you know I think we shouldn't have said that we can't compete against low-wage countries. What we should have said is given the fact that there's a wage difference, how are we going to compete. And one way that we can compete is to be more productive right. One way that we can compete is to use the knowledge that's available to make better decisions about our manufacturing processes. I don't think it's that heavy of a lift.

I think Tom is right on the money here. We're not starting from zero. I think we have to make a decision as a country that manufacturing is important to us and then we have to create an ecosystem that delivers the skills and the people with those skills that make the manufacturing robust, competitive, resilient, all of the things that were called out in the response to Executive Order 13806.

Goettler: Definitely. Tom, anything from your perspective if we're talking about responding to the skills gap and thinking about productivity enhancements and some of the things that are readily available today in the manufacturing marketplace, that can help, you know, give a stiff arm if you will to the manufacturing skills gap, anything that's jumping to the front of your mind too?

Kurfess: Sure. I mean Scott has already said this. Every time you make a cut with the machine tool you're like running an experiment, but when Scott and I were graduate students what 35, 40 years ago, you know, we spent weeks putting these instruments on the machines and then you had to analyze all the data for weeks afterwards and so forth to get a result. Now it's all there, it's available, it's free. The analytic tools are there and the reality is the people know how to use it. If you look at I mean what a lot of industry people are or companies are looking to do is they say hey we want to hire people who have some good computer skills. So we are trending a lot of good computer people and you know even our junior high and high school kids who are programming arduinos. I mean this is like, I don't know, $15 right? It's got more horsepower than the Apollo main computer for putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon you know and okay, there's your 50-year difference right there you know. So it's just amazing in terms of what's going on. So the reality is the opportunities are there and, by the way, it is a two-way street. You mentioned industry 4.0 so that's all the analytics and so forth and people like oh my gosh the cloud and how do we deal with that? Look we got stuff streaming out to the Google drive right you know to your Google drive right and so the bottom line is everybody's using Google drive or something else you know, AWS, dropbox are a few, and so they're used to it. So yeah these are all integrated together and it is a two-way street. One thing I do want to highlight is look, you tie all this together, make sure you do it in a secure fashion, for example, like the Cyber Security Manufacturing Institute that we're standing up out of the Department of Energy. Important, you know it's called Cyber Security Manufacturing Institute right, but the important thing there is make sure you're safe but the other thing is you know this has other implications outside of manufacturing. Some of the stuff I'm learning about. Man I could tell you I came back home and I did a little bit of rewiring at home and again, these are things that we're just training you know machinists, operators, programmers, you know engineers to do because it's important. So yeah, frankly speaking not only about manufacturing skills it's also about life skills and it's awesome.

Smith: I think that there's a real opportunity to get some of the educational activities into bite-sized pieces and things that could be done remotely learned remotely. I think we saw a lot of this during the pandemic. Our capacity to do things remotely is better than we thought it was and there's a lot of examples of science that we have developed over the years that we really didn't do a good job of deploying. I mean you know from, I'm a machine tool guy, so I'm going to point at machine tool performance. Most people who use their machine tools just really don't know what the machines are capable of doing right? They do trial and error or they make good guesses and they use their machines and they make good parts and I don't mean anything bad about that, but the machines are capable of a lot more and I know you know this Jamie because MSC has spent a lot of effort in this area recently. There are tests that we can do, but you know those tests have existed since the 1960s okay, they were well known in laboratory environments, research institutes knew them very well, but we didn't do a very good job deploying them into the industrial base. I think we have a real opportunity now to cut these kinds of things and this there's a huge pipeline of these tools, get them in deployable forms into the hands of the people who can really use them, shorten the distance in time and in space between the information and the people who need the information you know. If I looked at, for example, the metrology work that we used to do on parts, you make a part and then it would go off to a metrology lab and it would soak there for a while and then someone would make a measurement and by the time the information got back down to the machine, it was long after the part was made, really not in enough time to make any kind of an adaptation to that information. We're measuring that data in real time now and adapting the process on the fly. There are lots of opportunities like this and I'm going to say bite size pieces, continuous learning for people who already have jobs, what can they do, what can they learn to make their job better, to make their company more productive. I think there's a huge opportunity in that.

Kurfess: Let me just say because I just can't help myself, I think Scott missed a really wonderful opportunity. In particular, like I'm a digital manufacturing guy. When he talks about bite-sized opportunity, the thing I think about is B-Y-T-E man, and that's and I think that's that and so really I think they're across the board and they're going to appeal to a wide spectrum of current generation workforce and next generation workforce. I'll let you go ahead Jamie, but I just couldn't listen.

Goettler: I'm so glad that you're sharing that and Scott, one of the things that you talked about, a couple things you know the both of you talked about here in that last response to the last question was you know continuous learning or learning, but also virtual learning. And Scott and Tom, I know you're both close to this. Scott, I'll ask you to start. You know, there's forums out there and opportunities, free to the public to take advantage of learning about you know what you care most about and that's machine tools and machining and I'm wondering if you wouldn't you know mind sharing a little bit about some of the work that's being done to educate those who might be interested in machining.

Smith: Sure. So what Jamie's talking about is a project that we have that was funded by the Department of Defense, the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Group, and we call it ACE (America's Cutting Edge). It has a lot of components to it but there is an educational component and there is an online series of courses that you can take that talks about machine tools, machining generally, CNC programming, and machine productivity, how to make the best use of the machine that you have in your facility. Now almost a lot of that content is virtual and and that's really good people can get experience with these processes remotely, but you know hands-on is important as well. And so these things are connected to a hands-on boot camp and we just had the first one of those last week. The first 10 people that went through there but the training has been a a pretty big success. There's over 1500 people who have taken at least some portion of that online training and I think it's continuing to grow. There's a demand for this kind of thing.

Goettler: The demographics Scott frankly that I've seen from Dr. Tony Schmitz has been you know prominent with ACE, you know a wide age group, a wide you know working environment group has been involved so all sorts of folks have gotten involved with ACE as we've seen and yeah last week ACE completed its first hands-on course which was absolutely tremendous to see and quite an accomplishment.

Smith: If you haven't seen those courses, look for them. ACE and Tony Schmitz have done a terrific job putting that together.

Goettler: By all means. Dr. Kurfess, as we wind down this episode, any parting shots or comments from you regarding the skills gap or how the viewership watching this you know might think first about how to deal with the manufacturing skills gap, any last words of wisdom?

Kurfess: Yeah, so I think look, I think we've hit on all the key points here and so forth as Scott has just talked about in terms of you know the whole eye bass approach to the ACE program with machining I think this is what's going to be happening in a number of different areas so we've got machining and metrology is going to be coming up you know, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, so you name it, it's going to be getting out there so it's going to be more accessible. And I'll sort of end with a futuristic thought and I agree with the hands on there's no doubt about it. I grew up in a machine shop myself and then you know that's made all the difference, but I think we're also going to see some cool technology in terms of let's say virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality coming down the pipe. I got to wear safety glasses in the shop anyway, why not make them augmented reality and give you a heads up display right there it's coming. How soon I don't know but I tell you that's also going to be a really changing technology both in terms of just productivity as well as workforce development.

Goettler: Yeah so Scott and Tom again, thank you for all the great work that you do and thank you for joining us in these first three episodes. You're really creating the foundation for which MSC's Tooling Up video series can jump off and when I think about the skills gap, the way I'll leave the audience here is several years ago I had an opportunity to work with a vocational technical institute that was involved in advanced manufacturing and the mantra they shared with me back then I had not heard before and some of you may very well have, and it was you know we can bring somebody in here that wants to learn and in a couple years they can be out in American manufacturing in a clean environment and making sixty thousand dollars a year or they can go to a four-year school, be searching like crazy for a job and have sixty thousand dollars worth of debt and it really, really opened my eyes to you know what's possible out there you know with American manufacturing and the opportunities that exist you know for  any age of workforce but particularly the younger workforce. So once again Scott and Tom thank you so much, to the viewers thank you for watching, and stay tuned for more episodes of MSC's Tooling Up. 

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