Celebrating Manufacturing Day

Today is a day to celebrate, it is Manufacturing Day!!! At WSU Tech’s National Center for Aviation Training, we will fill our auditorium and have an amazing event, providing 100s of students the opportunity to hear, see, touch, and do many aspects of advanced manufacturing. We get to interact with a variety of high school grades and schools to introduce them to all the great career options and our programs that led to these jobs. I’d like to think that the event impacts a least a handful of students to choose manufacturing. We do celebrate with the students and it is truly awesome.

In the same auditorium six months ago, Andrew Crowe spoke to another full auditorium of middle school and high school students. If you don’t know Drew, he is the founder of the New American Manufacturing Renaissance Tour. He uses his own story of growing up in inner-city St. Louis, fighting poverty, being a teenage father, and a convicted felon, who eventually found a manufacturing job to change the direction of his life. A direction that has now taken him through two college degrees, a teaching job, a trip to the White House and the Pentagon, along with countless other media appearances. Overall, he has made it his mission to connect his story to the inner-city youth of America’s cities, those who look more like him, African-American youth, Hispanic-Latinx youth, those without direction, without fathers, or other obstacles in life to share his story in a hip-hop culture style narrative to relate that manufacturing is a life path and they can be successful, they can succeed. He rarely talks about specific careers, he talks about paths and what manufacturing can do to change their life. He is the example, it saved his life, and freely admits it. He shares this same message with industry partners, associations, community organizations, and employers to help them realize that the journey is a two-way street. They must change, they must have skin in the game, the status quo cannot remain if we want to attract this untapped talent. Equity and inclusion in policy and practice must be the action of modern manufacturing companies.

Drew and I spent time together in April and again in May at the Project MFG finals that he hosted and were held at WSU Tech. We quickly developed a great friendship, we realized that his message and my passion share a common bond, we want to change the landscape of what America Manufacturing can be…all of America, not just a segment. We met again last month at the McCormick Center in Chicago at the nation’s largest trade show for manufacturing, IMTS - International Manufacturing Technology Show. Drew was one of the headliners for the entire show. If you don’t know IMTS, it showcases new equipment, processes, and innovative technologies across manufacturing and brings with it over 100,000 people to Chicago, millions of dollars, and the future of the industry. This future is highlighted at the Smartforce Student Summit which provided learning experiences and content for 1000s of students and educators around the region displaying the manufacturing technology of the future. I spent time every day at the Smartforce Student Summit, it was Manufacturing Day, all week!!! Truly awesome. Greg Jones, the AMT staff, and all of the vendors did an amazing job showing tomorrow’s workforce what manufacturing careers and jobs can look like.?

The focus of IMTS is advanced technologies but one of the underlying themes was workforce and the lack of trained workers currently filling the manufacturing jobs that are needed today. That gap is getting wider, every day. Deloitte estimates a shortfall of over 2 million manufacturing jobs by 2030. IMTS had keynotes and sessions on talks on strategies and solutions for workforce issues. Drew was one of those. He and I were talking on the last full day of the show, and I asked, what was the most amazing thing you’ve seen this week in Chicago? We sat and talked about it.?

It wasn’t million-dollar 3D printing machines, robots lifting cars, the jet pack guy, or innovative cutting-edge technologies. It’s simple. We saw the Mexican Independence Day Celebration virtually gridlock and shut down Michigan Avenue, one of America’s busiest and most commercialized streets. Celebrations, flags waving, cars honking, people cheering, fireworks going off. The Mexican-American population of Chicago sharing their culture, celebrating the historic day. Down in McCormick Center, it was much quieter. Using Drew Crowe’s principles, we should be celebrating with them. Manufacturing as an industry needs to do more. We need to reach out to the cities and towns and realize that we have a workforce problem. We have a wealth of untapped potential in our communities, we need to find more Drew Crowes. Kids relate to the hip-hop culture he brings with his message. I have seen that reaction in-person. The celebration that we witnessed was the epitome of a cultural celebration, September was Hispanic Heritage Month, where was that highlighted at IMTS??

However, it shouldn’t just be industry’s problem to solve. At the Smartforce Student Summit, IMTS created an amazing opportunity to introduce kids to manufacturing. The Summit should have been overwhelmed with kids all week. They did have great participation, well over 10,000 kids came through. However, according to their website in 2020, Chicago Public Schools had over 104,000 students in high school and another 50,000 in 7th and 8th grade. The future workforce of the Windy City. Eighty-four percent of these students are Hispanic or African-American that’s over 130,000 students. They were not there. Shame on Chicago Public Schools for not going out of their way to get the future of America’s workforce at the nation’s largest manufacturing trade show. They shouldn't bear all the blame. Companies at IMTS spent millions to be there, surely someone could have stepped up and provided transportation access.

At WSU Tech, we are trying to do our part. We created a Community Resources Navigator that works at the Evergreen Library and Community Center to focus on interacting and working with community partners such as Empower to reach out to the north end on what education and training possibilities are out there in a largely Hispanic-Latinx community. In the same part of the city, we partnered with one of our local school districts to start new manufacturing pathways that focus on entry-level jobs in production, assembly, maintenance, and automation. This pathway was supported by the city of Wichita and with it, the very first high school program dedicated to Automation Technicians in Kansas. We worked with this same school district to add Intro to Manufacturing into Middle School. We need more, a lot more of these positions and programs, not only in Wichita but across Kansas and America.?

As Drew Crowe says, this isn’t about politics, right/left, it doesn’t matter. If we want to maintain and grow our manufacturing competitiveness, if we want to continue to expand technology and automation, we must support opportunities for young people of color to realize that there are life-changing opportunities in manufacturing. So today, I’m celebrating Manufacturing Day for everyone.