Manufacturing could be short 1.9M workers if the talent gap isn’t fixed

Companies need millions of workers in production and tech roles, a Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study says. Experts worry the industry can’t keep up.

Manufacturing is shooting past its pre-pandemic norms.

The industry, aided by both massive private and public investments, has seen huge gains in employment and capital spending on new projects in the last five years.

Employment reached 13 million as of January, while the number of manufacturing establishments in the U.S. rose by more than 11% between the first quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2023, reaching 393,000.

And yet, the industry is staring down a major obstacle to all that growth — labor.

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