OXON HILL Md. – Reviving U.S. manufacturing has emerged as such a hot election-year issue that an entire afternoon of an energy technology conference was devoted to the barriers to domestic manufacturing and obstacles to retraining the U.S. manufacturing workforce.
Those new workers will require design skills that are integral to modern manufacturing along with “soft skills” like critical thinking, leadership and collaborative abilities, experts agreed during an Energy Department conference this week across the Potomac River from Washington.
Corporate executives, educators, current and former bureaucrats and an ex-congressman all weighed in on the erosion of the American manufacturing base and how to return it to global competitiveness. Most argued that labor costs and energy usage aren’t the key barriers; what is needed is a revival of flexible, design-driven manufacturing and a new, modular approach to training the next generation of machinists, engineers and technical managers.
Throughout the preceding two centuries, the U.S. led the world in deploying disruptive technologies ranging from railroads and the telegraph to an electrical grid and communications networks. No more, argued market researcher Stefan Heck of McKinsey & Co. “Where we are lacking is the guts to deploy new technologies.”
Heck’s use of the word “guts” refers not only to the infrastructure needed to roll out new technologies by the willingness to take risks in order to reap the benefits of new energy and other innovations. He argued that much of the semiconductor industry has left the U.S. not because of labor costs - which account for only about 2 percent of the chip production costs - but because most U.S. chip makers “haven’t been willing to make the investment” in the capital equipment needed to operate advanced chips plants.
Heck, who worked closely with global chip companies before shifting his focus to cleantech, was among a range of experts addressing manufacturing and workforce issues during an Energy Department summit sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Leo Christodoulou, program manager for DoE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, noted that manufacturing currently accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, employs about 12 U.S. million workers and about 60 percent of U.S. scientists and engineers work in manufacturing-related fields.
Factory floor skills must be augmented by design expertise.