SkillsUSA - Closing the Nation's Skills Gap
The United States faces a need for nearly 3.5 million manufacturing jobs over the next decade and 2 million of those jobs are likely to go unfilled due to the skills gap, according to new research from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute.
Eighty-four percent of manufacturing executives agree the nation is now facing a critical skills gap. Reshoring Initiative President, Harry Moser states “A strong skilled workforce is key to reshoring and manufacturing growth.”
A benchmark for closing the nation’s skills gap is the SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference held in Louisville, Kentucky June 20-June 24, 2016. It is designed to showcase the best career and technical education students from across the country. More than 16,000 people— including students, teachers and business partners — participated in the weeklong event to address closing the nation’s skills gap.
SkillsUSA is a partnership of students, teachers and industry working together to ensure America has a well prepared skilled workforce. SkillsUSA helps each student excel. It provides educational programs, events and competitions that support career and technical education (CTE) in the nation’s classrooms. SkillsUSA improves the quality of America’s skilled workforce through a structured program of citizenship, leadership, employability, technical and professional skills training. SkillsUSA enhances the lives and careers of students and educators as they strive to be Champions at Work. SkillsUSA serves more than 300,000 students and instructors annually. The organization has 18,000 school chapters in 54 state and territorial associations. More than 18,000 instructors and administrators are professional members of SkillsUSA. SkillsUSA knows how to motivate students, teachers, volunteers and representatives from corporations to come together to excite and inspire students to seek rewarding careers in manufacturing and technology. SkillsUSA take a strategic approach to addressing manufacturing burning platform to graduate skilled and career-ready citizens. Top tier companies like Toyota, Snap-On, Harley Davidson, John Deere, Caterpillar, Hunting Ingalls Industries, Haas Automation and others industry leaders were there in force. Haas, for example, brought 60 volunteers and provided all the CNC machines for contests relating to machining applications. The Haas Technical Education Center Network is an industry & education led initiative that enables manufacturing technology educators and their schools to acquire the latest CNC machine tools and related CNC ancillary equipment, software and educational materials. Businesses are coming to the SkillsUSA conference to recruit the next generation of makers to help their companies to retain and bring jobs back home, making “Made in America” and “American Dream” a reality! ________________ by Glenn Marshall, Newport News Shipbuilding(retired) Benchmarking Champion and Career Pathways volunteer. Contact him at marsh8279@aol.com to share best practices to close the nation’s skills gap.