The manufacturing industry is facing a skills crisis: 75% of manufacturing companies say they’re having problems getting the skilled people they need. This trend has led to intense competition for skilled workers. 

Skills matter: The two biggest barriers to business transformation across all industries are "attracting and retaining talent" and "skill gaps" noted by the World Economic Forum. 

In 2022, there were 500,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. alone. That number is expected to quadruple by 2030 to more than 2,000,000 unfilled roles. The scarcity of skilled workers pushes demand for them ever upward. For many manufacturing companies, this war for talent isn’t sustainable.

Most organizations follow an obvious strategy: When they’re missing a critical skill, they invest in recruitment. They post jobs, run interviews, and then hire new people. This isn’t working.

As the War for Talent Heats Up, There Are More Unfilled Positions Than Ever

Even when organizations manage to attract the ‘perfect hire,’ those hires don’t stay perfect for long. Nearly half of workplace skills will be disrupted in the next four years, especially the most in-demand skills like leadership, adaptability, computer-automated technologies, AI, and robotics. This is a short shelf-life for such a massive investment.

There is a better, more sustainable, and more scalable talent strategy: Building skills internally often involves a comprehensive corporate learning platform that helps manage and deliver training programs across the organization.

You’re a manufacturer. You build things. So why are you fighting so hard for pre-assembled talent?

Another approach to skills

Focusing on a culture of learning and skill development comes with many benefits. 

First, it allows organizations to triage by focusing on developing the specific skills they most need in the moment. It also allows companies to be nimble as new skills emerge (which they constantly do.)

Skill-building also improves engagement. Employees love it. In fact, employees under 25 across all industries value ‘access to training’ even more than they value career opportunities. These are the ‘lifelong learners’ you hear about but rarely find. What’s more, 74% of Gen Z and Millennials are likely to quit over the next year if they don’t get sufficient skills development opportunities.

Because of this, an effective learning program is a powerful retention tool. In fact, organizations (in all industries) with a strong learning culture have an average of 57% better retention than baseline.

Finally, a successful learning program is a competitive advantage. 75% of manufacturing organizations identified reskilling as important for their success, but only 10% said they were ready to address this trend. By becoming leaders in reskilling, organizations can become leaders in talent acquisition and retention—and by extension, leaders in the industry.

Other impacts

Let’s not bury the lede: There is a strong and direct link between learning and safety. Investing in learning doesn’t just boost business outcomes; it can save lives.

One study looked at UK-based companies across utilities, transport, manufacturing, and construction. It found that the industry with the most training has the least fatalities (utilities.) The reverse is also true: Construction offers the least training and has the most fatalities. Sadly, manufacturing isn’t far behind construction in terms of risk, which suggests manufacturing companies need to invest more heavily in training.

Investing in learning doesn’t just boost business outcomes. It can save lives.

Training also makes workers feel safer. In every industry, workers expressed concern about their safety due to a potential lack of training. 

Turning to the U.S., the Brookings Institute's research on robotics shows the same trend: When manufacturing workers learn how to use new technology, injuries go down. When organizations increase the presence of robotics by one standard deviation, they see a .15 standard deviation decrease in injuries. However, if not trained properly, workers will instead experience increased stress rather than increased safety.

Beyond safety, learning impacts business performance. Companies that excel at learning are over 50% more likely to have experienced growth in the past year. 

The data is clear and unequivocal: When you invest in learning and skill building, your business performs better.

Organizations Who Excel at Learning Perform Better on a Wide Variety of Measures

Getting started

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you chart your learning journey.

Tip #1: Exceptional learning doesn’t require a massive budget

The highest-performing organizations spend 27% less on learning and development (L&D), but deliver far better business outcomes. This doesn’t mean they don’t do exceptional learning. They do. But they learn smarter, not more expensively.

Tip #2: Find a content solution

Every learning program needs content. But many businesses fall into the trap of building this content themselves.

The line of thinking usually goes like this: “We need learners to understand our product and no one understands it better than we do. So let’s build courses from the ground up.”

Here’s the problem: Just like skills, your product frequently changes and evolves. This creates a constant need for new learning content, which is incredibly time-consuming to produce. 

Building Learning Content is Resource Intensive

For most organizations, it’s not feasible to regularly invest this amount of time on creating learning content. 

We recommend a two-pronged approach:

1. Consider using a content aggregator. The best aggregators update their courses frequently and focus on relevant, in-demand skills, including leadership training. When the skills change, the aggregator will update their courses to keep pace.

2. Leverage generative AI. These tools empower organizations to create bespoke learning material that covers proprietary or company-specific information (like product specs or marketing messaging.)

   Be judicious here: Your chosen tool will be able to output courses in traditional formats and insert knowledge checks to ensure learning effectiveness. The most common Generative AI tools today aren’t optimized for learning and may not be pedagogically sound.

Tip #3: Keep the learner in mind; focus on engagement and efficacy

Research shows that a blended learning approach yields the best results, most efficiently.

Blended learning means delivering learning across more than one modality and channel. For example, having a digital learning portal and running live workshops or demos. It could mean slide decks, quizzes, and video. Companies that use a blended learning approach earn 50% more net income per employee. Why? Because when a learner isn’t chained to a single type of learning, they’re more engaged and retain more knowledge.

Another great way to boost learner engagement is to personalize learning. Warehouse employees don’t have the same work experience as the back office, and they shouldn’t train the same way either. 

Social learning is an effective strategy here, since it happens informally (on the floor) and in more structured situations (like in a digital community.) By focusing on social learning, organizations can become places where workers ask questions, share knowledge, and engage with internal experts. It also helps bridge the content gap through user-generated content.

Tip #4: Elevate your learning technology

It’s possible to deliver more effective learning for less, but it requires innovating. The world’s top performing companies are 3x more likely to experiment with new learning tools.

A powerful learning platform is the best way to learn more efficiently. And just like in manufacturing, there has been a shocking amount of innovation in a very short timeframe. 

Modern platforms can automate enrollments, localization, content management, recommendations, versioning, tagging, search, and more. This creates incredible efficiencies at an incredible scale.

Modern learning technology, including remote training platforms, is no longer solely built for administrators—or even for learners. The best learning technologies out there are full-fledged business tools.

Tip #5: Measure, measure, measure. Then improve.

If the only thing you knew about your manufacturing efforts was “units produced,” you’d be in trouble. The same is true with learning: “Time spent learning” and “course completions” are insufficient data points.

The most successful organizations correlate learning metrics with business metrics. They can see the relationships between learning and employees’ retention, between new training and safety outcomes, and between sales training and quota attainment.

Conclusion

You’re a manufacturer. You build things.

So why are you fighting so hard for pre-assembled talent?

Invest in learning and build talent yourself. Not only will it strengthen your organization; it will build workers who are more productive, more loyal, and more resilient to change.

Docebo is focused on helping enterprises deliver scalable, hyper-personalized learning to all their audiences, including specialized solutions like LMS for manufacturing.

Opinions expressed by contributing authors are their own.