Manufacturing and millennials: People & Companies

On the one hand, many employers in the manufacturing industry view millennials as being self-absorbed, unfocused, disloyal, addicted to mobile devices and lazy. On the other, most millennials don’t view a career in manufacturing as something they want to pursue.

In a 2014 online survey of 1,009 adults from ages 19 to 33 by Deloitte/Manufacturing Institute, manufacturing ranked seventh in preference as a career choice. Technology came in first, followed by health care, financial services, retail, communications and energy.

If manufacturers are having a tough time finding workers today, the situation is only going to become more challenging as baby boomers continue to retire in droves and the U.S. is theoretically poised to add millions of great-paying manufacturing jobs while the unemployment rate is less than 5 percent.

The reason this generation of some 80 million people don’t desire working in a production plant probably has less to do with having a negative perception about the work environment, pay and job security and more to do with not having much of a perception at all about the manufacturing industry.

“In my high school, there were zero programs in metalcutting, and that goes the same for any high school in the Denver area,” said 23-year-old Camoren Schley, president of Denver-based Industrial Coolant Systems LLC. “None of my friends have any idea what CNC machines are. The best thing to do is get programs set up in public schools.” (For more about Schley’s company and products, read “High-pressure holemaking” in the Productive Times section of the January 2017 issue.)