U.S. Manufacturing’s Brave New World

The nation has an advanced manufacturing skills deficiency. What are some possible solutions?

After losing 6 million manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2009, the American manufacturing sector has reemerged as a beacon in an otherwise lackluster economic recovery. While many Americans believe that U.S. manufacturing is dying, unbeknownst to most of them, U.S. factories today produce about 75 percent of what they consume. The future growth, however, of American manufacturing—for both domestic and export consumption—will be predicated on what is touted as “advanced manufacturing.”
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an advisory group of preeminent scientists and engineers, defines “advanced manufacturing” as a family of activities that either depend on the use and coordination of information, automation, computation, software, sensing, and networking, and/or make use of cutting-edge materials and emerging capabilities enabled by the physical and biological sciences, including nanotechnology, chemistry, and biology. Advanced manufacturing involves both new ways to manufacture existing products, and the manufacture of new products emerging from advanced technologies.
These advanced manufacturing opportunities are available now and will be in the future, if industry leaders and government policymakers are able to capitalize on them. For instance, while total manufacturing employment has declined in recent years, high-skilled manufacturing employment opportunities have increased by upwards of 40 percent since 1980. Yet, according to an October 2011 survey of American manufacturers conducted by Deloitte Consulting, respondents reported that 5 percent of their jobs—or 600,000 jobs—remained unfilled simply because they could not find workers with the right skills for the positions, and that this employee deficiency was having a negative impact on their ability to expand operations or improve company productivity.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/september/u-s-manufacturings-brave-new-world