Advanced manufacturing requires not just the right technologies but the right skills to use them and realize their value.

Microchip production is a vivid example of the shifts taking place to introduce innovative technologies on the production floor. (See related article, “Advanced Manufacturing Skills Workers Will Need”). There are more than a thousand steps to making chips, with hundreds of variables involved in each step. The process calls for automation and intelligent machinery—and people with specialized abilities.

Meeting the demand for these advanced manufacturing professionals will require teaching workers new skills and ways of working and attracting new talent to the sector.

While automation may eliminate some of today’s job requirements—for example, manually collecting data, generating reports, coordinating tasks offline, or specializing in hands-on operation of a specific machine—there will still be humans in many factories. And there will be new jobs and tasks, such as programming software-driven machines, using AI tools for on-the-spot analytics, working with collaborative robots (cobots), and identifying opportunities to improve processes and reduce waste.

As a company develops its plans for integrating more advanced manufacturing technologies into its facilities and workflows, it’s also important to look at what those proposals will mean in terms of their existing and future workforces. Alongside calculating the business value of advanced manufacturing technologies in improving and transforming production, leaders should outline the skills and capabilities required not only to use these new technologies but to drive the ongoing changes they will enable.

Among the steps leaders can take are creating new job descriptions (and the career trajectories those roles can take) and establishing training programs for existing or new hires to fill those roles. New factories also present an opportunity for companies to reshape perceptions among prospective employees, showing that those facilities are akin to technology workplaces and that people who work there can embark on careers that provide valuable skills.

Here are four moves for cultivating and attracting new talent in advanced manufacturing:

1. Develop new role descriptions and career plans.

The first move is to develop new job descriptions and create new career plans for people who fill those roles.

For example, AIM Photonics, a research and development institute focused on photonic integrated circuit automation, created a workforce plan in conjunction with MIT’s Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing. The project’s aim is to meet employers’ changing talent needs. Researchers working on this plan learned in interviews, for example, that graduate school students had a deep understanding of integrated photonics but lacked knowledge on how to design them for manufacturing.

This kind of insight can help both educators and employers adjust training opportunities.

2. Align training with the adoption of advanced manufacturing technology.

With an understanding of the new skills and capabilities needed to design, run, and improve next-generation production facilities, manufacturing leaders can develop training programs for production personnel.

In the textiles industry, for example, the Advanced Functional Fabric of America, which aims to increase adoption of advanced fiber and fabric technology development and manufacturing, is participating in a project to develop a modular set of training programs to upskill and reskill workers. The organization is working with the MassBridge Project, which was awarded a $3.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop training programs for high school and college students to learn advanced manufacturing skills; these will serve as a national model.

Likewise, AIM Photonics and MIT outlined the training that technicians would need in the next three to five years in areas such as fabricating and assembling optical systems, diagnosing and resolving process or product problems, designing and running new testing methods, and recommending design changes.

3. Rebrand manufacturing job opportunities as technology-centric.

Manufacturers have struggled to keep their most valuable workers in a marketplace awash with higher-paying alternatives in industries that have seen higher growth in recent years. The sector, once attractive for its wages and security, has faded in popularity with job seekers.

“Manufacturing faces significant branding and reputation challenges, being frequently viewed as a physically taxing industry where jobs have few opportunities for advancement,” says Michael Gretczko, principal and chief business architect at Deloitte Consulting. “The industry’s ranking as a preferred industry continues to fall.”

Many manufacturers are already facing staffing shortfalls. There were 803,000 open manufacturing jobs as of February 2023, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis, suggesting the industry is struggling to attract the talent it needs today. Manufacturers have also failed to capture a balanced share of the labor market to date. For example, women are just 30% of the manufacturing workforce, while they represent 47% of the overall professional workforce.

As companies move toward more advanced manufacturing approaches, they have an opportunity to burnish their appeal to potential hires and expand their recruiting efforts beyond traditional manufacturing talent pools.

The manufacturing jobs of tomorrow are not machinist and floor manager roles of past decades. Manufacturers will, in essence, become technology companies capable of providing cutting-edge, transferable skills and modern, productive employee experiences. Those opportunities will have more appeal to high-performing candidates—but manufacturers will need to change some traditional perceptions about manufacturing jobs to attract the skills and capabilities they’ll need to design, run, and improve their future factories.

Manufacturers can start with an audit of their employer brand to determine what existing and would-be employees think of their company while looking for opportunities to refine their reputation in the talent marketplace. They should also review candidate-facing content, such as job descriptions and LinkedIn posts, to ensure that they reflect the more compelling opportunities the company is offering.

4. Offer flexible work options.

Flexibility is a key consideration for many potential hires throughout the marketplace, and as manufacturers support greater digitalization and automation, they will be able to offer more remote work options than in the past. Today, the accessible workforce for a plant is constrained to a region.

As manufacturers integrate cobots and virtual and augmented reality technologies, they will be able to offer more remote work options, not just for those at HQ but also for those performing tasks on the factory floor. An increasing number of positions, such as machine engineers and quality control professionals, can be performed outside the plant.

The integration of advanced technologies could also have a positive result on manufacturers’ ability to attract a skilled and more diverse workforce. “Robotic worker augmentation and jobs that require less manual work should lead to less fatigue-related injury and lower requirements on a worker’s own physical strength and endurance,” says John Liu, principal investigator in the MIT Learning Engineering and Practice Group. “When stewarded well, this improved physical accessibility would also positively affect diversity. Enabled by advances in robotics and industrial metaverse technologies, the future workforce could be composed of people from the full gambit of ages, genders, and levels of physical ability.”

Companies that prepare now for the changing skills and capabilities they will need to drive their advanced manufacturing visions will be a step ahead. They’ll be better positioned not only to transform their production facilities in the coming years but also to reap the benefits of a workplace transformation. While the integration of advanced manufacturing technologies and processes will play out differently by company, experts say the coming shifts in human resource requirements will largely be beneficial for both companies and their employees.

Regardless of how a company moves into a future of advanced manufacturing, it will need to develop the right talent, according to Liu, who says, “I see the workforce of advanced factories to be more competent, integrated, empowered. They will also be more frequently upskilling, collaborative, distributed, diverse, and motivated.”

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