By Shannon Gabriel, Managing Director, Leadership Solutions Practice, TBM Consulting
The assembly line was experiencing 65% turnover, a problem so severe that long-time veterans of the plant were reluctant to train new people. Why bother if new employees would exit as soon as training was completed?
Welcome to the challenging reality of the 2022 workforce shortage. While it’s a problem in almost every industry, it’s particularly acute in manufacturing. As of the first quarter, employment in domestic manufacturing was down 219,000 from pre-pandemic levels — this at a time when Industry 4.0 is supposed to be revolutionizing the sector through automation and IoT innovations and bringing manufacturing jobs back on shore.
