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Education and Workforce

Author
MEP National Network

Many manufacturers are struggling to find and retain employees. It’s time to approach employee attraction and retention differently. Find out how in The Manufacturers’ Guide to Finding and Retaining Talent.

Author
Ranita Jain, Nichola Lowe, Greg Schrock, Maureen Conway

This report evaluates a novel variation on the programming offered by the US Manufacturing Extension Partnerships (MEPs), public-private partnerships supported by the US Department of Commerce. In July 2014, with the support of the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance (CWFA), the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) launched the Genesis initiative to improve both business success and job quality at small and medium-sized manufacturing firms in the Chicago region.

Author
Ball State University

The 2019 Manufacturing and Logistics National Report shows how each state ranks among its peers in several areas of the economy that underlie the success of manufacturing and logistics. These specific measures include: manufacturing and logistics industry health, human capital, cost of worker benefits, diversification of the industries, state-level productivity and innovation, expected fiscal liability, tax climate, and global reach.

Author
Alan Berube

This report identifies 141 legacy communities, counties containing a city with between 20,000 and 200,000 residents, that have a significant history in manufacturing and experienced lower-than-expected job growth from 1970 to 2016. It compares their conditions, assets, and challenges to those in two other types of counties containing small and midsized cities: non-industrial and transitioned.

Author
MIT Work of the Future

MIT President Rafael Reif convened the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future in the spring of 2018. Its goals are to understand the relationships between emerging technologies and work, and to explore strategies to enable a future of shared prosperity.  This report will not provide definitive answers, but instead aims to enable decision-makers to ask the right questions.

Author
Robert D. Atkinson

This paper examines the nature and prospects of robotics and associated production technologies, reviews the literature on their impact on spatial dynamics, reviews recent data on robotic adoption, including controlling for robot adoption rates by domestic worker compensation rates, and speculates on future trends in the spatial distribution of manufacturing.

Author
Robert D. Atkinson AND Stephen J. Ezell, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

For manufacturing enterprises, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape the source of value creation, the formation of new business models, and the delivery of value-added services such as mass customization, predictive maintenance, and “product servitization”. As AI becomes more prevalent in various aspects of business management and operations, investing in people will become even more important.

Author
McKinsey Global Institute

Much of the research on automation has focused on the potential for job displacement and has taken a national-level view. This report looks beneath the national numbers to examine the present and potential future of work for different people and places across America. Local economies across the country have been on diverging trajectories for years, and they are entering the automation age from different starting points.

Author
Josh Bivens

This policy memo focuses on one major economic argument in favor of increased infrastructure investment—that it would increase demand for American manufactured goods and, in turn, generate American manufacturing jobs. As this memo shows, more jobs will be created if policymakers take steps to reduce the yawning U.S. trade deficit that allows jobs to “leak” outside the U.S. economy as U.S. spending increases.

Author
Sridhar Kota, Thomas C. Mahoney

This MForesight report identifies fundamental weaknesses in U.S. manufacturing and the risks these weaknesses pose for long-term wealth and security. It emphasizes the need for concerted national action to rebuild and restore manufacturing skills, capabilities, and productive capacity. The problems have developed over decades but have become worse with time, now reaching the point where we have lost the ability to scale emerging technologies because of a weak industrial commons.

Author
Anthony P. Carnevale, Neil Ridley, Ban Cheah, Jeff Strohl, Kathryn Peltier Campbell

The glory days of American manufacturing in the 1970s—when workers with a high school diploma or less held 79% of the industry’s jobs—will not return. By 2016, these workers made up just 43% of the manufacturing workforce. Upskilling and Downsizing in American Manufacturing finds that workers with postsecondary now outnumber workers with a high school diploma or less in manufacturing. 

Author
Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

The Way We Were: The Changing Geography of US Manufacturing from 1940 to 2016 explores how manufacturing has lost ground in many places and is now the largest employer in only two states.

Author
Marcela Escobai, Ian, Seyaljose Morales-Arilla, Chad Shearer

Although today’s U.S. labor market is strong and unemployment is low, many working-age American remain marginalized. As communities across the country grapple with the challenges of an ever-evolving labor market, this report provides a framework for local leaders to grow good jobs through industrial development strategies that are based on their regions’ unique capabilities.

Author
Manufacturing Policy Initiative School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University

Smart manufacturing depends critically on information governance: rules (formal and informal) concerning the collection, flow, and analysis of information, often in digital form. To explore information governance issues in depth, the Manufacturing Policy Initiative at Indiana University hosted a roundtable event in Washington, DC, with executives from nearly 20 manufacturers. Policy experts from academia were asked to contribute to papers on specific topics including AI in manufacturing.

Author
Keystone Research Center Future of Work Project

This report analyzes AI’s likely impacts by examining past impacts of technology, including robotics and information technology, on the economy and jobs. It also considers how AI does—and does not—go beyond previous technologies and substitute for human capacities and intelligence.

Author
World Economic Forum

Many companies are piloting Fourth Industrial Revolution initiatives in manufacturing, but few have managed to integrate Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at scale to realize significant economic and financial benefits. The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, scanned more than 1,000 leading manufacturers. Subsequent outreach enabled visits to the most advanced sites and identification of the few factories that are true guiding lights.