The skills crisis isn’t good, but is it all bad?

The skilled labor problem is probably here to stay in metal fabrication and manufacturing, and in some respects, that might be OK. Getty Images

During the last day of FABTECH® 2019, two young welding engineering students stood and asked a good question of a panel discussing the skilled labor problem: “As young people entering the workforce, what can we do to prevent us from having this same panel discussion in 20 years?”

The panelists gave some good answers, mainly about being able to collaborate with the right combination of confidence, respect, and humility. But admittedly, it’s a hard question to answer, because it can all seem overwhelming. What can one person really do? Yes, the country needs a far better pipeline for technical manufacturing talent. A network of technical schools offering stackable, portable credentials could do a world of good, perhaps filling the void left by all the abandoned vocational programs at high schools and the underfunded ones at community colleges.

When those engineering students asked that question about the skilled labor crisis, I had a realization: 20 years ago, I was writing about the same thing, and I’m willing to bet I’ll be writing about it for another 20 years. The nature of the skilled labor issue could change in a profound way, depending on how technology progresses. Regardless, I predict the issue is here to stay. In some respects, that might not be a bad thing.

At The FABRICATOR’s Economic Forecast Breakfast at FABTECH, George Mokrzan, a Columbus, Ohio-based senior economist, Huntington National Bank, showed a telling chart detailing the inflation rates of real estate, health care, education, and goods. To be sure, the chart illustrated a very top-level analysis, grouping all “goods” into one basket. But on a macro level, the trend lines were clear. While prices for real estate, education, and health care have skyrocketed, the prices of goods have remained relatively flat.

How have those prices stayed so flat? Globalization and automation play their parts, but so too does time. When you can produce things in less time and with fewer resources, things obviously cost less. But less time is the rub, and perhaps one of the major root causes of the skilled labor crisis.

When I ask fabricators about the greatest changes they’ve seen during the past 20 years, shorter lead times usually top the list. Next on that list is smaller though more frequent order quantities. Customers now get just what they want, when they want it, and they’re not paying much for it. Because it takes less time and labor to fabricate, prices remain low while customer service remains high and response is quicker than ever.

Now we have shops cutting, bending, and welding at record pace, juggling pieces through an ever-more-dense spaghetti diagram of job routings. Modern equipment, complete with adaptive cutting control, active bend angle measurement, and user-friendly welding controls, has made the actual act of making parts much easier. Theoretically, at least. Of course, when a highly productive system breaks down, mayhem ensues—perhaps more so than it did in the past, because the shop is producing so much in so little time.

Then shops have the challenge of managing all the information about those parts. They’ve got multilevel bills of material spread across various databases and legacy systems. Because software has changed so much over the past 20 years, nothing is standard.

And it’s rapid change. In fact, “rapid” could be the defining adjective of the modern fabricator (and modern life, for that matter). During The FABRICATOR magazine’s 50th year, we’ve been reflecting on the characteristics of the industry through the decades. Industry veterans have recounted stories about how they laboriously wrote G-codes and fed tape into a machine controller. They performed flat layout manually, pulling out the slide rules and trig tables to run through the bend calculations. It took time to do a job right, and people spent years in apprenticeships and other training programs to learn how to do it.

Now, in the rapid shop, with everything software-based, one can produce a lot in less time, but one also can produce a lot of bad parts in a hurry. The minutiae are automated, yet shops still have old equipment, and they need people who know how to run it. They need people who can manage a chaotic storm of fast-moving information while paying attention to details and knowing enough about metal fabrication fundamentals to run older machines and uncover solutions that modern software overlooks.

No wonder the skilled labor crisis persists. If you’re looking for easy money, a metal fabrication job shop is the wrong place to look. Still, talking with industry veterans, I don’t think the job today is necessarily harder or easier than the job of long ago. It’s just very different. Now more than ever, the job deals with rapid change. And that rapid change can make hiring and recruitment very challenging. You hire someone for one thing, but then the market shifts (rapidly, of course), and pretty soon you realize you need someone entirely different. No wonder so many fabricators these days hire for attitude and soft skills, including the ability to deal with change.

And as I said earlier, this might not be a bad thing. If the shop environment changes rapidly, and in an intelligently strategized way, it’s adapting to market demands, which means it’s likely to remain a going concern for many years to come. If nothing changes and the shop shutters its doors, well, that’s no surprise.

As software matures and artificial intelligence ups its game, the nature of work will change. With schedules automated and adaptive, and machines and software talking to each other and constantly learning, employees will be managing systems, not parts. Will their jobs be easier? Probably not. Will the skilled labor crisis still be with us? Probably so. Why? Because rapid change is here to stay.