It’s no easy task to overcome the double whammy of high staff turnovers and rapidly changing technical skills,. However, that’s the task facing most process industry employers and manufacturers in general, and the only real solution is training, training and more training.
“About 40% of CESMII‘s members are manufacturers, and they’re telling us their top workforce issue is the average tenure of their senior staff has decreased from 15 years to less than five years,” says Conrad Leiva, VP for ecosystem and workforce development at the Collaborative Ecosystems for Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII). “This is about half due to retirements and about half due to high staff turnovers in recent years, especially among younger personnel.”
CESMII is overseen by the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DoE). It’s hosted by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and is one of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 18 Manufacturing USA institutes that seek to advance adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies to increase the competitiveness of U.S. industries.
Leiva reports this rapidly changing workforce dynamic means employers require more training and tools to bring their remaining people and new hires up to speed. This need is increasingly urgent because of the second major workforce issue reported by CESMII’s members, which is that job descriptions and required skills are also changing fast to keep up with recent technological advances. This means workers with those skills are hard to find, if not entirely scarce in many disciplines and locations.
“The other problem is that many small to medium-sized companies don’t have the resources or aren’t willing to grow skills internally. Only the largest companies typically have skills development programs like this,” explains Leiva. “Closing this gap depends on colleges adequately training workforces, so new workers won’t need as much training once they’re hired by smaller companies. We’re seeing more partnerships between colleges and manufacturers, but they’re still mostly led by large companies that can invest in them.”
Regardless of whether they’re small or large, most manufacturers and other businesses still face high staff turnover rates, especially among younger employees. Consequently, Leiva adds they need to think about bigger pictures and longer terms, and continue to train personnel, but also offer them career paths to higher pay and better internal opportunities. This can help reduce the risk of them gaining skills and leaving.
Clear paths and approachable pieces
Competitive salaries are essential for retaining employees and reducing turnover, but Leiva explains it’s even more important for them to feel like they’re part of their company’s internal team and community, especially if some members are frequently offsite and working remotely.
“Increasing collaboration, enabling access across departments and levels, and sharing a pool of experts between sites can all build better teams by showing participants they’re supported and valued members of the team,” explains Leiva. “They also need to be shown there’s a clear path from entry level to higher pay, which many employees say is frequently unclear in their organizations. Without well-defined training and advancement pathways, employees can quickly feel stuck, which may prompt them to move to other companies or industries.”
All of these and other workforce development efforts also need to be combined and coordinated, so they’ll have the best chance of engaging both new and experienced employees. For example, Leiva reports that CESMII‘s smart manufacturing overall mission is to transform manufacturers at scale, but because these are very large topics, teaching them needs to be broken into approachable and digestible pieces. CESMII is using a micro-credential strategy for education and training modules that average 40 hours of content and working with the Smart Automation Certification Alliance (SACA). These micro-credentials include theory instruction and hands-on competency testing, and they can be earned and stacked to achieve competency along different professional pathways.
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The micro-credential aligned classes can be taken at more than 300 colleges nationwide that are SACA members. While they’re typically attended by employees seeking new skills, high school students can also take them to earn career and technical education (CTE) credits, or college students can take them to earn credit towards two-year and four-year degrees in various states including Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan and Florida.
Reach out to teams and communities
To attract better-educated, candidates and retain newly micro-credentialed staffers, Leiva adds that each company’s managers and leaders must talk directly with their team members, spend time with them, and know what they’re doing to develop a genuine sense of community. They must also reach out to and get involved with local community colleges and regional workforce agencies, develop curriculums and help teach them, and organize internships, co-ops programs and apprenticeships.
“Many community colleges have huge success rates with co-ops and apprenticeships, so much so that many students are hired before graduation,” adds Leiva. “This often means the colleges have to work with employers to have students hired early finish their degrees, so they’ll have a more complete set of the skills for future jobs.”
Because digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are emerging and evolving so quickly, retraining and updating skills with modular methods like micro-credentialing is more important than ever.
“AI is the latest example of new technology that can assist users in their jobs and complex tasks. In manufacturing, AI can help users avoid errors like performing steps out of sequence,” says Leiva. “Previously, workers with specialized skills often did the same jobs for many years. Now, technologies are changing quickly and a more flexible workforce is needed that handles a broader variety of jobs. This means employees will likely come to depend more on digital work instructions, including accessing micro-learning videos while performing the job. AI and other digital tools can help, but workers will also need to develop a new mindset that includes embracing and practicing continual education to regularly refresh their skills via closer, ongoing partnerships between workers, employers, and educators. Industry-vetted, micro-credentials can provide a framework for that education.”
