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We won’t fill manufacturing jobs and skills gaps by pushing more kids into coding bootcamps; we’ll fill them when we rebuild the industrial tech stack to reflect reality Chicago, Illinois – June 24: Workers assemble Ford vehicles at the Chicago Assembly Plant. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Getty Images Over the weekend, I stumbled onto another article about how American factories can’t fill 400,000 open jobs. It’s full of stats, quotes, and the usual suspects: baby boomer retirements, immigration crackdowns, the college-or-bust myth, underfunded training programs. All true, all predictable, and all missing the point. It’s not as simple as, “we need more workers in manufacturing.” Actually, we need to unlock more of the potential in the ones we already have. The people running our factories aren’t just operators; they’re engineers, systems thinkers, and problem-solvers. But for too long, we’ve given them siloed, rigid, one-size-fits-all manufacturing execution systems (MES) that create technical barriers that don’t need to exist. If we rebuild the industrial tech stack to reflect the real nature of frontline work, we’ll give the people already doing the work the power to improve it. 12.7 Million U.S. Manufacturing Workers, and No One to Work? Currently, there are two camps: one warns that agentic AI-powered humanoid robots are going to replace factory workers, and the other argues manufacturing companies simply can’t hire fast enough. But the facts don’t fully support either position. The truth is: Automation, robotics, and AI aren’t coming in to change everything overnight. Our industry pretends to move fast, but in reality it moves pretty slow. And, with the high stakes of production line disruption, we need humans-in-the-loop (HITL), not lights-out factories. Modern manufacturers don’t necessarily need more “blue-collar” workers; they need a new architecture and a new tech stack. Think of it like giving factory teams…

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Filed under: News - @ September 22, 2025 10:27 pm