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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Manufacturing

They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
As in other industries, leaders in the manufacturing industry are concerned about a high percentage of the workforce retiring over the next decade; this is particularly true as they continue to struggle to fill entry-level positions.

Employer Quote Region
"We can't even fill the positions we currently have open. We're short about 10 welders for sure, and I know we've got at least four retiring this year. We're really lacking the new people really bad." Central
"They're going to be retiring, and there's going to be much more demand. That's the biggest cause of our turnover, retirements, and it has been for several years." Central
"We've done quite a bit of extensive research on workforce demographics. We've been going out and identifying who we have and what they do. So, for every job that we have on the property, by classification, we've identified from zero to four years out and from four to ten, who potentially could be leaving. And we are very proactive at our company. Even when we don't have jobs, we are interviewing and we are recruiting. There are 20 major engineering schools across the country that we actively recruit at. We're on the campus all the time. We try to get to the Northeast Higher Education District schools, to find out who the talented students are. We're in there helping with trainings, providing guest lecturers, etcetera. The key is to be proactive—to identify where the deficiencies may be in the future—and have those people lined up before the brain drain goes out the door." Northeast
"Within the next five years, 40 percent of our workforce is going to be retiring. That equates to almost 500 positions." Northeast
"As the Baby Boomers leave the workforce, we're going to be really in a lot of trouble because it takes time to train new hires. All of our machinery is computer controlled, it's highly specialized, it's a lot of technology." Northwest
"We don't let them retire. We keep them on. We encourage them to stay with us on a part-time basis. Yeah, that's been going on for a long time." Northwest
"We really have to focus in the next few years on knowledge transfer. We have an aging population that is going to want to retire, and for many of them, they are the people that have figured out how to do everything. When you look at them running a machine or doing a specific skill, they make it look so simple because they are the ones that figured it out. They know the steps, and we've worked on knowledge transfer a little bit in certain areas, but I think that whole piece of, 'Will their knowledge transfer?' is a question. Again, generationally, folks operate differently." Northwest
"I think being nimble is going to be important. The five percent skilled manufacturing growth rate along with the aging workforce is probably going to push demand higher. That will impact how quickly we're going to need to get them in the door over the next few years." Southeast
"I think MnSCU has an opportunity—and that's where I think the community colleges can really be at the tip of the spear—is to get into the companies. I'd love if we had enough internal talent to move up. A lot of people—the old-timers—will say, 'Hey, 20 years ago we had a pretty good group of people we could promote to leads, and those leads could become supervisors. And maybe with the little bit of polishing, that supervisor could become a manager.' That's the kind of company that we have been the last 40 years. Today, you look at that 70 percent labor pool, and you've got people saying, 'I don't see a diamond in the rough there.' It's tough. I don't see who's promotable. It's another great opportunity for MnSCU to get involved—and that means MnSCU has got to be flexible. Get in there with a labor program on-site and work with the employers. I think that's the big problem as the Baby Boomers retire—we lose the skill and institutional knowledge of glass fabrication or making Spam or whatever the hell it is that the company does. That knowledge and those skills walk out the door with them." Southeast
"We're going to be misaligned because, right now, we're looking ahead two to five years, and wondering where our replacement workforce is going to come from.

Question: So, you're thinking about transitioning those laborers into other positions?

Employer: As much as possible. But it's not ideal, right?"		 Southeast
"I'm the total neophyte because my background is more in the service world than it is in a manufacturing world. So, in the last nine or ten months, I've had to try to understand manufacturing like, 'How do you attract people,' as well as, 'How do you assist people through?' And my concern is that, within our shop, we have a lot of older workers who have great talent and knowledge, and that talent and knowledge is going to get lost in the not-too-distant future." Southeast
"Fifty percent of our machinists are able to retire right now. That's people who are 55 years of age and older. So, we're expecting to see a huge turnover of machinists in the next few years. To prepare for that, we've partnered with [MnSCU colleges] and created our own internal machinist development program. We're looking at all our employees in our other production areas, assembly areas, who we know have the aptitude to move into a technical area, and we've developed our own machine certificate with [MnSCU college]. We've got five people going through that, and we plan on putting at least five more people in that program each year." Southeast
"The average age at our plant is 54 years old. In those 10 years, we'll literally have to turn around the entire plant's workforce, and I don't think we're unique in that way. There are a lot of Baby Boomers that are going to leave. Where are the people going to come from who will replace those skill sets?" Southeast
"Employer 1: Our company is over 60 years old, and some of our employees have grown up at the company. So, we have an aging workforce, and we do have manual labor. We have very little automation. So, our people are wearing out. They're getting tired, and there are things they can't lift. So, we need to adjust and accommodate where we can. Physically, our workforce now has difficulties doing the work, to be able to do what they once could do.

Employer 2: We're in a similar situation. And one of the things—through the union—one of the outcomes is that when we have lay-offs, we generally have to lay-off the younger people first because it's based on seniority. So, it shifts the demographic age of the workforce higher. We're at an average age at the factory of almost 48. In the next ten years, we're going to have a tremendous amount of turnover. And, even though we have a lot of automation, it's still hard work and it does wear people out. So, we're going to be looking."		 Southeast
"We haven't gone very far down the curve of having a real structured plan in place. Can you replace 300 people over the next five years? Where are they going to come from? How are we going to get those skills? We are just starting that dialogue." Southeast
"I'm not letting them retire. You know what? If I can keep them on part-time, I'm going to keep them on. We're doing everything we can to make the Baby Boomers want to stay, like letting them work two days a week. I'm not letting them go." Southeast
"Question: Are you concerned on the other side of the spectrum in terms of long-term employees that are closer to retirement? And are you going to be able to replace those skills?

Employer: Very much so. It's a small insular community. Employees are just amazed when I hand out their anniversaries. Some of them have been there longer than I've been alive. It's going to be a real issue when they start leaving; these are the people who can fix everything—they make it work every day, they figure out how to put the peg in the right hole."		 Southwest
"The question was whether I'm concerned that 40 percent of all maintenance, nationwide, is going to retire in the next ten years. The answer is that I'm scared out of my mind. That's why Fit was developed. It was developed so that we could take somebody who has the basic rudimentary wrench-turning skills, and make them into what we need as an organization. MnSCU decided to kind of go away from company-specific programs and make it much more generalized. We're okay with that. I'd like more company-specific, but that's fine. But if the question is: Am I scared that we're about to face the hugest exodus from the labor force in the history of the labor force in America? Absolutely. And there are not enough people in the MnSCU system to fill it. Even if they were able to bump up the recruiting dramatically. There are just not enough people to fill the holes, so we have to get really creative. That's one of the reasons we're looking at automation and robotics. More so than anything else, we just don't think there are going to be people to actually do the jobs or if they'll want to." Southwest
"We're really looking for people that want to live somewhere around here, just to be within a commutable distance. Our workforce—we have either people who have been with us less than five years or people who've been here over 20 years. So, in about ten to fifteen years, we will have a number of people leaving. Even with those long-tenured employees, those-long tenured employees were very mechanical but not necessarily good programmers. So, we're really hurting for CNC machinists." Southwest
"I know this is a listening session but—as an HR person— I feel like I have to share with you. There was a company that saw a huge group of employees moving towards the exit door with retirement and nothing to backfill. And we put together a program. It's a two-year program that incorporates the Tooling U, which the employee does outside of their work time. And we package that with 32-hour units in lab experiences with an instructor on some very specific topics. It took us a year to finalize the curriculum. We have a manual machining piece. And so they do roughly—off the top of my head—eight online courses, and then they come in and they work 32-hour lab components to each of those. Probably, the key to the success though is that I then put them on their own little independent internships on the company floor. So, it's not all external. There's an internal component to make sure that these folks are being prepared and groomed to step forward when those openings occur. So, we had our first group go through last year. And, we now have the second group. And the first-year group will now become second year with an emphasis on CNC, while we start a new group on manual. Hopefully, this will self-perpetuate, and they will continue to develop for those positions that there is a need for. This was a very specific program for a particular company in terms of the selection of the coursework that was selected from Tooling U. The lab components—we're working with the company's drawings. So, the students are actually creating in the lab, creating those things that they would run into on the manufacturing floor. It's worked very well. It's a win-win situation." Southwest
"I think we're going to turn over something like 40 percent of our workforce in the next five years—everything from engineers to operators to maintenance technicians to tool makers. We're looking for all kinds of people." Southwest
"Talking about retirement, I'm scared. Over 25 percent of my workforce will retire in the next five years." Southwest