It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know the manufacturing skills gap isn’t going anywhere. As proof, cruise over to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website. You’ll see that the country has 414,000 job openings in manufacturing. That’s a lot of good paying jobs. What you might not have known is how to fill them.

Sadly, that last statement—how to fill those jobs—is just as true for employers as it is for their potential future employees: students who wonder what they’ll be doing after graduation.

The Manufacturing Skills Gap Solution

Let’s start with the latter. To all you high schoolers out there (and younger), please know that CNC machining presents excellent job opportunities. To begin with, you can look forward to great pay and benefits. Secondly, you’ll have a chance to learn new skills, with plenty of room for advancement. Above all, the opportunity to make cool stuff with your hands.

Now, you might say, “But employers need people now!” Patience. Between NAFTA and the societal “thou shalt go to college” mindset, the manufacturing skills gap problem took decades to develop. Sorry, but fixing it will be a generational undertaking, not one that will need a few months or even years to solve.

So now what? Easy—if you’re a student, enroll in shop class. Some call it Industrial Arts or Technology Education. Regardless, just get your hands on a manual mill, engine lathe, or surface grinder. Turn the cranks, pull some levers, and learn all you can about metalcutting.

That’s what countless students at Wausau West High School have done. They call it Warrior Manufacturing, and many have gone on to great careers. Furthermore, if your high school is fortunate enough to have a CNC lathe or machining center, learn all you can about operating and programming one. If you like coding, you’ll fit right in. Best of all, you’ll have no student debt.

However, that might have to wait until after graduation, when you go into trade school. For example, there’s Mountainland Technical College (MTECH).

As you can see, they invested in a KVR-2418A CNC milling machine, along with a whole bunch of other machine tools from Kent USA. Graduate from there, the University of Dayton, or one of the many other technical schools in the U.S. and you’ll be off to a great start.

Bridging the Manufacturing Skills Gap

Employers, listen up. Stop posting on those online recruiting sites. Instead, reach out to Laramie County Community College, Gateway Community and Technical College, or whatever vocational technical institution is in your area. Their career people almost certainly have a list of upcoming or recent graduates, ready to get busy contributing to your bottom line.

Better yet, ask them about their apprenticeship program. That’s what more than one hundred Wisconsin businesses near Mid-State Technical College have done. The results? A solid flow of workers, eager to begin their new careers. Good luck to all of them—it’s a wonderful industry, one that Kent Industrial has been proud to serve since 1979.