BOTTLENECK: If manufacturing booms, will we have enough job-ready workers?

“Even before Trump took office, a 2024 report from Deloitte forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033,” Pondiscio writes. The report also predicted that “half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed.”

Career Tech Education (CTE) is expanding, and helping young people enter the workforce, he writes. High school CTE “concentrators” (students who take multiple CTE courses) tend to outperform classmates in earnings and employment rates, and are much more likely to be earning above-poverty wages seven years after high school.

However, CTE programs don’t always align with local job markets, Pondiscio writes. Furthermore, “only about five percent of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing.”

I think educators and parents see manufacturing as exclusively blue collar, and fields like health and business as giving students college options.

For all the worry about steering students away from college, many don’t have the academic skills for college or for job training.

Those declining math scores are a “flashing warning light,” Pondiscio writes. Robots do the repetitive jobs. “If three-quarters of our students can’t master middle school math,” how will they learn to program the machines?

People will learn a lot for the right pay, even math.