Manufacturing Training: The Perfect Solution for the Talent Shortage

The search for skilled laborers has become a great scavenger hunt. Recently, ManpowerGroup released their seventh annual talent shortage survey which proved skilled trades are still among the hardest positions to fill in 2012, a first place spot it claimed last year as well. Machine operators and machinists moved from tenth to the ninth most difficult jobs to fill while skilled trades remained at number one, engineers took the number two spot and IT staff took three.

Bosch Rexroth, a worldwide leader in producing drive, motion and control technologies for manufacturing equipment, announced their plan to expand their Fountain Inn, South Carolina plant some time ago. The new facility, which has amounted to a whopping $80 million investment, will be the biggest hydraulics manufacturing plant in North America once completed. In an effort to fill open positions for machinists and maintenance technicians, the hydraulics manufacturer held numerous job fairs in multiple cities, only to find they faced the same issues as many other manufacturers seeking skilled laborers.

The ManpowerGroup’s survey noted that 55 percent of their respondents said there was indeed a lack of talent available or no applicants at all. More than half, about 54 percent, of the survey’s respondents also said another major issue with filling positions was due partly to the fact that many prospective employees were looking for more pay than what they had to offer. 44 percent of those surveyed noted the third leading cause of problems filling available positions was a lack of experience or industrial training. Overall the survey showed that 49 percent of U.S. employers have had a hard time filling jobs, compared to 34 percent worldwide.

With the talent shortage becoming an issue across the globe, many employers may be forced to develop their own talent through the use of industrial training. The benefits of manufacturing training are endless, but perhaps one of the greatest payoffs is the ability to train your own workforce in house, hands on and in multiple formats. For more information on industrial training programs that can help you avoid the trials of searching for the talent your manufacturing plant requires, contact ITC Learning today.