Desperately Seeking Help

Tom Moulton, CEO of the manufacturing company Sleepnet in Hampton, has big plans for growth this year. The company, which makes sleep equipment including masks designed to treat apnea, recently launched a line of respiratory masks for hospital patients on ventilators and plans to introduce several new products this year. If all goes well, Moulton says, business could triple. That is if he can find the five to eight additional manufacturing workers he will need for that growth.

Filling manufacturing jobs has been a chronic problem for the industry for decades. Even during the height of the recent recession, there were as many as 600,000 open manufacturing jobs despite a national unemployment rate above 8 percent, says Christine Scullion, director of human resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, D.C. And the problem appears to be growing worse as the economy recovers and manufacturers begin to expand again. A survey from the Manufacturing Institute last fall found that 79 percent of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of qualified applicants for open positions, across every state and sector of the industry.

The problem has become so pervasive that the National Association of Manufacturers launched a special task force last fall aimed at trying to help manufacturers address two of the main reasons behind the workforce shortage: the increasing skills gap between workers and the specific technical capabilities manufacturers need, and the scarcity of STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) critical to the manufacturing industry, says Scullion.

In NH, there are only two engineering schools—the University of NH and Dartmouth College—though several other schools, including Saint Anselm College and Keene State College, offer engineering programs, and five community colleges offer associate or certificate programs in engineering fields. That means companies here don’t have a strong pool of engineering graduates from which to hire and often must rely on recruiting out-of-state candidates.

Adding to that challenge, there simply aren’t as many people looking for jobs. The Granite State is among the top 10 states in the nation for having the lowest unemployment rate—4 percent as of this past December.

“If I have to hire five people, where do we find them? I can’t just hire anybody,” says Moulton, who keeps resumes from job candidates on file for months, even after the role is filled, so that he doesn’t have to start from scratch every time he needs to hire.

Still, he says he has it better than most manufacturers. “At least I can train somebody. For some of those operators who are dealing with more technical stuff and machinery and need people that understand math and computers, I sympathize with them. They’re facing some real challenges finding people and getting them up to speed,” he says.

Bob Hines, COO of Admix, a Manchester-based manufacturer of industrial-sized mixers, says his company struggles to find both assembly workers and skilled machinists. “Now that manufacturers have realized that domestic production can compete with imports, we do not have the advanced skill sets needed for those roles,” he says.

The Skills Gap Widens

Manufacturers with growing businesses find themselves forced to either hire someone who may not be qualified for the job or leave that role unfilled.

“Whenever we have an opening, it is difficult to find qualified people,” says David Greer, president and CEO of Wire Belt Company in Londonderry, which makes conveyor belts. “One thing that most do not understand is that manufacturing today is not what it was 20 years ago. It is not the assembly line manufacturing that most people think of where an employee is required to tighten the same four bolts on a car frame in an endless line of car frames. … Most manufacturing equipment nowadays is robotic, computer controlled and requires some knowledge of computers, math, reasonable English skills and some basic technical understanding.”

Industry experts say it’s not that the applicant pool is necessarily limited to the unhirable. Rather, says Scullion, the requirements for some jobs have become so specific that it’s difficult to find just the right candidate. For example, she says, many manufacturers are part of the supply chain, making pieces for an end user’s product. That end user may require certain standards, such as welding performed by a certified welder. But there’s a big difference between finding someone who knows how to weld and finding a welder who has studied the science and earned the certification, she says.

“Those differentiations are the skills that are in demand. Those are the jobs we are most trying to fill,” Scullion adds. Those specialized certifications are more difficult to find in candidates, leaving employers, when they can fill a position, to hire less-qualified workers and pay for them to earn that certification while working—a process that can take months or years.

Industry leaders and manufacturing executives generally agree that the lack of skilled workers is holding back the nation’s manufacturing sector. But they differ on how to best address the workforce gap.

Some say companies need to be willing to take on less experienced workers and invest in more training. That’s a strategy executives at Admix have tried to adopt. “For our entry level assembly positions, which seem to be the hardest to fill, we look for intelligence and a positive attitude and we can train them in the assembly skills that are unique to Admix,” says Hines.

Other executives say training isn’t always realistic, especially when there are knowledge gaps in some foundational areas. “We are too small of a company to create remedial programs that should have been learned in the school system,” says Greer, who adds that his company does provide internal training for workers to learn about the company’s equipment, as well as tuition reimbursement program to employees.

Moulton of Sleepnet says he’s more than willing to train, but such investment is a calculated risk.

“It’s hard when you bring somebody in, invest in them, train them, and they leave after one or two months or a year—all that investment you made walks out the door,” he says.

A PR Challenge

Some manufacturers and industry leaders say the problem isn’t just a skills gap—it’s an image problem. There’s a perception that manufacturing may be a dying profession, at least in the United States, says Greer.

“For three generations, parents have been telling their kids that ‘manufacturing is dead—it has all moved to China.’ That is just flat wrong. Parents need to understand that there are excellent careers in manufacturing and not dissuade their kids from entering manufacturing,” he says.

Seeking Solutions

The state of NH has some resources in place to help. Michael Bergeron, senior business development manager at the NH Division of Economic Development, says the state is heavily focused on recruiting manufacturers and that a strong manufacturing industry can help bolster interest from students and create a pipeline of future workers, he says.

“We’ve had a lot of success in bringing advanced manufacturing companies here, places with biotech and robotics that tend to have good paying jobs and career opportunities,” Bergeron says.

The NH Manufacturing Extension Partnership, meanwhile, is closely involved with the state’s community college system and with technical programs at high schools to help train students and raise awareness about the career paths available in manufacturing. Last October, a consortium of regional manufacturing leaders hosted “New Hampshire Manufacturing Week” to help raise awareness about career opportunities in the industry. The event included 54 manufacturers hosting 1,100 visits from high school students, says Zenagui Brahim, president of the NH Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

In the past few years, the NH Community College System received millions in federal funds that it invested in state-of-the-art manufacturing labs at several of its campuses to train the next generation of machinists and manufacturing workers.

In 2008, the state created a special task force, the Advanced Manufacturing Education Advisory Council, which is responsible for helping the NH Department of Education ensure students can develop the skills manufacturers need, says Brahim. “The state institutions are very engaged in all these initiatives. We just need to keep going,” he says

Still, closing the workforce gap may take years, he says. “These challenges cannot be solved as quickly as we all wish. It is a longer journey as we prepare a whole generation for career pathways in manufacturing,” he says.