The changing Facebook of manufacturing
May 21, 2007

1. Are you plugged in? Here’s an interesting story on what the aerospace industry is doing to stem the loss of engineering students. In short, it involves reaching out to college students through two words they understand and you may not: Ipod and Facebook. Don’t know what Facebook is? You should. Your kids know.

2. Manufacturing’s split personality: Another regional tale of woe from western New York state, on the road between Syracuse and Scranton. The local newspaper reports another effort to find and developed skilled manufacturing workers, noting “A substantial number of residents (are) without jobs even as employers in the region desperately seek skilled production workers, engineers, technicians and first-line supervisors, a recent study by Cornell University said. The skilled manufacturing labor shortage is creating a barrier to economic development.” These are not business to business problems; they are in every region of the country. Here’s how one region is attacking it.

3. And more on recruiting efforts: I don’t think we can keep making this point often enough – you can sit back and watch your workforce age and do nothing much about it, or you can do what areas such as WIRE-Net, an economic development organization in northeast Ohio in the Cleveland area is doing and reach out to your schools and your veterans and people who want a job and want a skill and show them what modern manufacturing is all about.

4: Quote of the day: In that article, from John P. Colm, president and executive director of WIRE-NET: “There's a future but, again, you have to be smart. You can't sit on your high school diploma. Manufacturing is far from dead. It's changing. Every part of our economy is changing.”

5: A little video to start the discussion: I’m not sure I agree with all of this. And it’s from Fox News, so I’m naturally suspicious. And try to get past the title, "Losing Manufacturing Jobs Is Good." But this discussion with editors from Forbes jams a lot of content into 3:29. It’s not the definitive word, but it’s a place to continue discussions…

Posted by Wolseley on May 21, 2007 | Comments (2)