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by Diane Himes, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Of all the issues facing U.S. manufacturing, the need to replace an aging workforce with appropriately skilled people may be the most significant — and daunting. |
| Keywords: | replace an aging workforce with appropriately skilled people, aging workforce, skilled people |
The Managing Automation/Thomas Publishing poll found that nearly 71% of survey respondents consider themselves "very concerned that U.S. industry is losing its competitive edge." Another 16% responded that they are "somewhat concerned that U.S. industry's competitive advantage is being challenged."
Nearly 80% of those surveyed said they think that the U.S. government should take an active role in strengthening industry, and Managing Automation has identified a set of four key issues facing manufacturing today.
This section looks at education, an area in which many factors have converged in recent years to produce a general sense that there is an impending "workforce crisis" in manufacturing. To those young people to whom manufacturing is still an attractive field of employment, a decline in performance in such core subjects as math and science means they're ill-prepared to compete with their global counterparts. Meanwhile, there are hardly enough people in the "millennium generation" (those born between 1980 and 1995) to replace the baby boomers on their way out of the workforce, and the Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1976) who will follow them.
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