Aligning Industry and Education for a Skilled Workforce
From machine builder FANUC to educational institutions nationwide, manufacturing stakeholders are finding early exposure and accessible training are vital to a healthy workforce.
Industry exposure at key milestones like high school can help to boost the next generation's interest in manufacturing.
LAB Midwest
It’s plain to see that U.S. manufacturers are struggling with workforce challenges. Observing the problem is easy… alleviating it will take an innovative approach.
The challenge of finding and maintaining a skilled workforce to operate increasingly advanced machinery has taken center stage in recent years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s probably not a conversation that we have with customers today that doesn’t somehow circle back to the workforce, education, and training,” says Paul Aiello, executive director of FANUC’s Certified Education Robot Training (CERT) Education Group. “It is certainly top of mind with every employer, every customer.”
The pool of manufacturing job openings reached 490,000 in April 2024, with a preliminary estimate of 586,000 open jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While that is a major reduction from the highs of COVID (993,000 openings in April 2022), there are still significantly more openings than there were just before the pandemic’s disruptions took place (383,000 openings in February 2020).
The worker shortage is far from over. The industry could have a net need for 3.8 million new manufacturing employees from 2024 to 2033, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute’s report, “Taking Charge: Manufacturers Support Growth with Active Workforce Strategies.” Of those new jobs, Deloitte projects 1.9 million to remain unfulfilled due to a combination of the skills gap and a lack of applicants.
Many companies have turned to robotics and automation as a solution as they face these gaps in employment. Industrial robot shipments have only grown since 2020 and are projected to reach nearly 50,000 shipments in 2026, PMMI Business Intelligence’s 2023 State of the Industry report says, citing data from Interact Analysis.
Robots may be able to replace some chronically unfilled positions, but they pose a new hiring challenge – finding workers capable of running and maintaining them. As a leading manufacturer of robotic machinery, FANUC is keenly aware of the problem.
“The only way to maximize the investment companies make in technology is to have a talented workforce,” says Aiello. “The last thing we wanted to do is throttle companies to say, ‘we can’t install that [machine] because we don’t have enough people to operate it.’ We never wanted that to be the hurdle.”
FANUC’s CERT solution to the skills gap
Aiello and FANUC saw the need for a talented workforce coming out of the 2008 recession. The company predicted a resurgence in manufacturing ahead but, much like today, knew many workers had recently been displaced, and that many companies would be unable to send employees to FANUC for training.
“We started looking at how we’re going to bring training closer to them, so we took a proactive approach to start working with schools” says Aiello.
FANUC’s CERT program started with about 30 school partnerships in the first year. Fast forward to the present, and the company partners with nearly 1,600 schools across North America.
These partnerships are far from lip service. The company provides each school with the latest technology, software, and curriculum to match the tools it offers in the manufacturing workspace.
When a school purchases a robot for education, FANUC supports the program further as a gift in kind, valued at about $320,000 for each school.
FANUC’s simulation software allows students to experiment with its robots without needing several systems in a classroom.LAB Midwest“We train and certify every instructor, we provide all the curriculum and corresponding e-learning software that mirrors the curriculum, and we also provide simulation software so that all the students in a classroom have access to learning how to program the robot virtually. That mitigates the number of robots the school needs, so they could have one or two robots in a classroom instead of 10 by utilizing our digital twinning software,” explains Aiello.
As of the end of 2023, FANUC has invested nearly $75 million into educational institutions throughout North America.
How does CERT training work?
The CERT program consists of three levels, each catering to increasingly advanced skill levels.
The first and most common curriculum level covers basic robot operations. It focuses on the foundational skills needed for an entry-level position or for current workers in development.
Students can then progress to the Intermediate Technician level, “which is where they get into peripheral devices communicating with the robot,” Aiello says. It prepares students or current workers for the responsibilities of an intermediate level employee.
The final Advanced Technician level focuses on system integration of advanced automation, covering “how to set up an entire system with PLCs and robots all working in concert with each other,” says Aiello.
Each skill level also aligns with FANUC certification levels designed in collaboration with the National Occupational Competency Testing Institute (NOCTI). Students are tested by a third-party administrator after completing a program and awarded a certification level to prove their skills and knowledge for current or prospective employers.
“[Certification] is our great equalizer among the schools,” explains Aiello. “If the students coming out of these programs pass their tests, we can know they were taught and understand that knowledge.”
FANUC understands that outreach to younger generations will be vital to maintaining a strong workforce, and hands-on education is the best way to keep them engaged.
“We had one math teacher in Center Line, Michigan, who said a lot of her students say they want to be engineers, but they start getting into more advanced math, and they just start falling off, because they can’t visualize the programs, problems, and theorems,” says Aiello. “But when she started showing them programs on the robot, the light bulb went off.”
Schools alone can’t solve the skills gap, especially without consistent communication from industry. Aiello explains companies, including FANUC, need to understand what is being taught in schools, and stay engaged and vocal about their own needs.
“I look at it like a three-legged stool,” says Aiello. “Employers must be very vocal about the talent needs that they have today, and the skills and talents they’re looking for. [FANUC] as a technology supplier, providing that technology to industry, we need to share that with education. Education needs to be very open to change and staying current, and they only way they can do that is to work with technology providers. All three are really codependent on each other to have the right process."
Tackling technical education regionally
Bringing manufacturing education tools and curriculum to schools across North America is a daunting task for a single company. That’s why FANUC works with education distributors to deliver its machinery and materials on a regional level.
One such group of education distributors is LAB Midwest, Mission Learning Systems, and ATS Midwest, which together cover seven states across the Midwest. The three companies deliver technical education from a variety of industry partners, with LAB Midwest and Mission Learning Systems acting as FANUC’s exclusive education provider in their regions.
The distributors start conversations at school districts, community and technical colleges, universities, and companies to gauge their goals and the needs of local employers. They can then integrate products and technologies from their partners for a comprehensive curriculum package.
“It’s all about getting the school excited about the technology, getting the employers excited about it, and then equipping the teachers,” explains Matt Kirchner, president of the three education distributors. “A lot of these times, these folks haven’t had a lot of exposure to authentic manufacturing technology. FANUC plays a big part of that in terms of their instructor training program. We also play a big part in terms of training the teacher around the technologies, and how to mirror and combine the FANUC robot, for example, with other emerging technologies to bring a great experience for students.”
The Midwest is a particularly important region to focus on manufacturing education, due to the industry’s concentration in the area.
“Specifically in the corridor between Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, that is the highest concentration of contract machining and OEM machining in the world, right here in the Midwest,” says Kirchner.
With such a concentration of industry in the region, Kirchner urges companies to engage with educational partners locally to support the pool of workers.
“Our industrial players must recognize that we can’t just point the finger at education and say, ‘why aren’t you sending me people?’” he says. “We have an integral role in working with our local educators in transforming education."
Education from K to grey
LAB Midwest, ATS Midwest, and Mission Learning Systems follow a philosophy Kirchner calls “K to gray,” offering educational opportunities that span age ranges to deliver the most effective material for each life milestone.
That starts with the youngest kids in school, which Kirchner explains is a crucial starting point. “Students are making career decisions as early as fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade. It’s not so much that they’re deciding what they want to be when they grow up, but they’re starting to turn off to certain career pathways,” he says.
Not every middle school student that gets exposure to industrial robots will become a robot operator in the future, but that early exposure to the industry can help lead students toward manufacturing and engineering careers down the line.
Supporting high school students also comes down to exposure, but with more focus on the several educational and career pathways available to them in the coming years.
More high school students are learning about manufacturing careers through FANUC’s curriculum and education distributors.LAB Midwest“A four-year university is certainly a good option for a lot of students, depending on their career pathway. But they can also go to a community or technical college and get awesome skills with very little debt, if any, and have a great career paying $70, $80, or $90,000 in some cases, right out of those programs,” Kirchner says.
High school as an exposure point for manufacturing has taken strides in adoption over the past few years, Kirchner says. A decade ago, community colleges were his companies’ top customer, but today almost 200 high schools across the Midwest are working with his companies to teach the technology.
“That’s when young people are starting to think about what they could be doing,” Kirchner says. “We tell industrial employers, if you walk into your local high school, and you don’t see a FANUC robot, or at least some kind of mechatronics learning system as we call them, that’s why you can’t find people. You’re not inspiring these young people toward these incredible careers.”
Supporting the next generation of workers ensures a strong workforce in the years down the line, but per the “K to gray” philosophy, Kirchner sees a major need for continued training and education in the current workforce.
“The technology that’s changing across manufacturing is also changing for that incumbent worker,” says Kirchner. “That individual must get exposure to cutting-edge technology and the skills that are going to be important as manufacturing technology goes from industry 3.0, which is early-stage robots and traditional manufacturing, to industry 4.0, which is highly data-driven, driven by smart sensors, smart devices, robotics, and automation.”
Workforce innovation at the university level
The importance of manufacturing exposure and inspiration at the high school level cannot be understated, but the university and community college level arguably play the most direct role in preparing the next generation of technicians and engineers. These institutions need to develop workers where the need is greatest.
Mississippi State University (MSU) understands this challenge and is using a “hub and spoke” model, collaborating with community colleges across the state to bolster the manufacturing worker pool well beyond its Starkville main campus.
The program, dubbed the Advancements in Manufacturing Upskilling Program (AiM UP), creates manufacturing training labs at community colleges in areas ripe for economic development. It’s the only one of its kind in U.S. manufacturing education, according to Dr. Reuben Burch, associate vice president for research at MSU’s Office of Research and Economic Development.
“Mississippi only has about 3 million people in it, so it’s a very low-populated state. If I’m a big manufacturer, I know that entry into Mississippi is easy; I know there’s a lot of land, and I know there’s going to be a lot of legislative support for companies,” says Burch.
He points to economic support from state government to attract major companies like Amazon Web Services and Steel Dynamics, with about $20 billion infused in the state in the past 18 months.
“The challenge is, if a company wants to move to Mississippi, will there be enough people in that area whom it can train and hire?” Burch explains. “If we’re training everyone in the same way across the state, which means everyone has access and exposure to advanced manufacturing equipment within a reasonable driving distance, we think we’ve eliminated that final economic barrier or excuse that companies would give not to move to Mississippi.”
AiM UP enhances the mechatronics programs already in place at these community colleges by adding cobots, vision training, and other elements that meet industry demand. Burch says over 80% of the robots in Mississippi are FANUC, so AiM UP sends its team to be trained through CERT before applying elements of that curriculum at community colleges. Other technologies available in the program include robotics systems from ABB, Universal Robots, and OTTO.CTE instructors from various high school programs get hands-on training with advanced manufacturing technologies at an AiM UP training lab.MSU
The program also creates a collaborative relationship between two-year and four-year college education that wouldn’t normally exist, as Burch explains, “imagine a future where you have two-year students that represent the technician and four-year students that represent the managers or the process planners, all in the same classroom, learning the same curriculum.”
Burch says retention and attraction are the two main elements that will help to alleviate workforce challenges.
Retention requires earning loyalty from workers. “You want them to see a future, a promotional path and projection for themselves and their families, so they want to stay in the community and make it better,” Burch says.
Attraction comes down to demystifying the industry for young people, many of whom wouldn’t be able to visualize such a career without exposure. Students might imagine robot programming as requiring a long and strenuous journey of university education.
While that might be true in some cases, Burch explains, introductory exposure to manufacturing-grade equipment can go a long way in showing students a career as a technician or engineer is attainable.
“I think the industry recognizes they need to do more of those things, but we as educational partners need to realize that too,” Burch says. “Recognizing that the hiring pipeline starts in middle school, just to get students to see manufacturing is a professional area they can grow into, and it’s one that they can easily conquer.”
Bridging the skills gaps internally
Companies can also consider making internal changes for immediate and lasting improvements in workforce retention.
Delkor is one example of actively bridging the skills gap and working to meet the needs of its own employees. The packaging equipment builder has felt the same strain of worker shortages as many of its vendors, competitors, and partners.
“Everybody’s in the same boat here. There simply aren’t enough people that have gone to school to become educated in [manufacturing and engineering]. There are also situations where you’re bringing in people with aptitude that’s different from what the skillset eventually needs to be, so you spend a lot of time on training” says Patty Andersen, vice president of human resources and aftermarket services at Delkor.
Delkor has long recognized the value in training as a key to employee retention, keeping employees from feeling bored or stagnated in their roles. Just last year, the company furthered this initiative with the help of a grant from the Minnesota Department of Economic Development.
Using funds from the grant, Delkor created over 100 two-to-four-minute micro training videos to help upskill new employees in critical areas.
“We embed those videos into our training software and put it together with verbiage and content so it’s blended training. You can read it, and you can visualize it,” explains Andersen. “It becomes standardized, and you have evaluations at the end so there’s confirmation that learning has occurred.”
Delkor doesn’t reinvent the wheel with these training videos; the company focuses on processes unique to its operations and uses already available training resources from organizations like FANUC or PMMI to supplement. The resulting blended training keeps seasoned employees and new recruits on the same page about the Delkor process.
Opportunities with support from PMMI
Andersen furthers the notion that companies shouldn’t try to solve the skills gap alone by encouraging participation in PMMI’s several resources for the current and future workforce. After becoming the first female chair of PMMI’s Board of Directors in 2023, and first chair-ever with broad human resources experience, she brings a new perspective on supporting the workforce in her role.
“Nothing’s broken [at PMMI], but there are some things that could be modernized, and that’s what we’ve been working on,” Andersen says. “We’re thinking differently about who the audience is at PMMI.”
The PMMI U Skills Fund is an effective way companies can lean on PMMI for both future and current workforce support, Andersen says.
For the future workforce, the Skills Fund will match contributions of up to $50,000 each year to regional manufacturing education programs of a company’s choice.
“Delkor has donated a lot of equipment to tech schools that desperately need it for training, troubleshooting, learning controls, HMIs, and PLCs for their students,” Andersen says. “Other companies can get involved with VEX Robotics or FIRST Robotics at the high school level, or sponsor a program, an event, or a summer camp. There are many options, and PMMI has left that to be all-inclusive.”
The Fund can also support current workers with a similar approach, matching a company’s contribution up to $10,000 per year for work-related, multi-employee training initiatives, from PMMI or other external offerings.
“I can see from the board level the funds are being used. We’re getting the traction that we want to have on it,” says Andersen.
“It’s a very broad brush that PMMI is sweeping, and it’s working, it’s been very well received,” Andersen says.
Keeping the workforce top of mind for companies
Andersen at the FANUC Private Show at the company’s headquarters near Tokyo, Japan.Andersen noted a significant focus on the manufacturing workforce among FANUC and its customers as she attended the FANUC Private Show at the company’s headquarters in Japan in May.
Conversations at the event emphasized the disconnect between rapidly advancing machinery and the skillset profile of the average American worker, along with the general labor resource gap contributing to a lack of applicants.
“You can’t let up on the throttle or become complacent about training. FANUC specifically is asking what they can do to help supplement current initiatives. What can they do to help bridge the gap?” Andersen says. “They’re doing a good job, reaching out to high schools and working with a lot of technical colleges. But that’s the question on the table… How are you going to bridge that gap, knowing that at least through 2030 if not longer, we’ll have a shortage of workers and a shortage of talent within that available workforce?”
The packaging and manufacturing machinery industry stands at a crossroads. With a significant workforce gap and rapidly advancing technology, the need for multi-level collaboration and outreach is more pressing than ever.
Through industry exposure, accessible curriculum, collaboration with educational institutions, and a relentless focus on training, leaders like FANUC, MSU, Delkor, and PMMI are paving the way for a more resilient and skilled manufacturing workforce.
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FANUC’s simulation software allows students to experiment with its robots without needing several systems in a classroom.LAB Midwest
