WAKE COUNTY, N.C. — Gov. Roy Cooper proclaimed Oct. 2-8 as North Carolina Manufacturing Week.
According to the National Association of Manufacturers, one out of every 10 North Carolinians is employed in manufacturing, but the industry will need to fill more than four million jobs by the end of the decade, and there’s concern that half of those jobs could go unfilled.
On Wednesday, SAS hosted the kickoff event for MFG (Manufacturing) Day to highlight ways the industry is changing as technology advances with the hope of inspiring the next generation of manufacturers.
“Manufacturers in the United States currently have nearly 800,000 open positions. That’s almost twice the entire population of Raleigh,” Jay Timmons, the president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said. “We’re currently in the middle of one of the tightest labor markets in years. It’s really a phenomenon that I don’t think anybody in modern history has experienced. It’s a workforce crisis.”
The manufacturing industry employs 450,000 North Carolinians, and Cooper is familiar with the concerns about labor as he recruits more companies to the Tar Heel State.
“When I talk with CEOs about coming to North Carolina or expanding in North Carolina, their top three issues are: workforce, workforce, workforce,” Cooper said.
On Wednesday, an electric garbage truck and autonomous John Deere tractor were brought to the SAS campus in order to show the next generation what the future of manufacturing looks like.
“I hadn’t really known very much about what the field was like, and my biggest takeaway is probably when they told us that it’s not just standing in an assembly line and putting things together. It’s interesting, it changes and it’s always going to be there. We rely on it really heavily so it’s a secure field to go into,” Sarah Eckstein, a junior at Apex Friendship High School, said.
A panel of speakers painted a picture of the realities of manufacturing and challenged the ideas that some students had about the industry before.
“Manufacturing is a little more data-centric. It’s not as dystopian as it probably would’ve seemed,” Achyuta Kannan, a freshman at N.C. State, said.
As manufacturers struggle to fill open jobs, Kannan says more outreach and educational events like Wednesday’s are needed to change the notions people have about the career field.
“I think it’s still the perception. Perception plays a lot into how people chose their jobs. As I said earlier, perception of cream of the crop tech companies like Google, Apple, Meta, but really it could be in a lot of other places and so now with this event and seeing there’s a lot of space open, I think I’m going to go and at least if not apply to these companies take a deeper look into the space,” Kannan said.
There was also an emphasis on hiring a diverse workforce in the manufacturing industry. Cooper says one thing that attracts a lot of companies to North Carolina is the fact that it has more historically Black colleges and universities than any other state. Cooper also said that N.C. A&T graduates more Black engineers every year than any other institution in the country.
