Gov. Scott Walker urged leaders at the Manufacturing Matters! conference in Milwaukee this month to remind young people of the great careers available in manufacturing.
Many speakers at the conference, hosted by the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership at the Frontier Airlines Center in Milwaukee, focused on the shortage of skilled labor available to manufacturers who want to hire but are struggling to find qualified candidates.
Walker pointed to the solid infrastructure, transportation and exporting partnerships that are available to Wisconsin manufacturers. He suggested a stronger educational pipeline should be developed to lead the way in growing Wisconsin companies.
“It is both a challenge, but it’s also a great opportunity,” he said. “We believe that we can move the state forward — we believe manufacturing is going to help us do that.”
Former Bucyrus International Inc. chief executive officer Tim Sullivan, a special consultant for business and workforce development for the State of Wisconsin, gave a keynote speech following Walker’s comments. Wisconsin has not made enough progress in fixing the talent pipeline for manufacturing, despite early warning signs, Sullivan said. He cited statistics from a 2003 Report on the State of Manufacturing in Wisconsin from the WMEP that showed manufacturers were talking about the current skills gap 10 years ago, but the problem has not been solved.
“I know that reform has to happen, certainly in the key areas that affect us as manufacturers,” Sullivan said. “We’ve made no or little progress to really addressing a lot of the issues in our state.”
Wisconsin should build on its driver industries and change legislative policies to address the labor shortages in the manufacturing sector, Sullivan said.
Worker migration has been an issue for the state for more than 10 years, with 12,000 workers lost from 2001 to 2010, he said.
When he was CEO of Bucyrus, Sullivan said he struggled to find local welders to fill the company’s open jobs and the company, which is now a part of Caterpillar, instead built a facility in Texas.
“We spent $250 million renovating and expanding a plant in South Milwaukee that we can’t fill,” he said.
The state can fix workforce development and training, but “unless we get the pipeline fixed all the way back to pre-school, we’re not going to win the battle” for more skilled workers, Sullivan said.
And the problem isn’t going away. According to a 2011 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce study, he said. The study projects 61 percent of jobs in Wisconsin will require post-secondary education by 2018 and 925,000 jobs will need to be filled in that time, so 558,000 of those employees will need post-secondary credentials.
Wisconsin has started to shift from its core competencies like manufacturing to more service-oriented jobs, Sullivan said.
“What we’ve created here is really a demise of the middle class,” he said.
He pointed to the state’s high reliance on social welfare programs, tax inequality and immigration policy as barriers facing an unskilled workforce.
Educational reform and a robust technical college system are keys to fixing the talent pipeline shortage, Sullivan said.
He suggested remodeling the K-12 curricula to include career technical education, establishing a technical college curriculum on a standard set of economic data, offering dual enrollment in both high schools and technical colleges, redesigning the delivery system for workforce development, encouraging training capability in the private sector and reconfiguring state budgets to better align with these solutions.
