The manufacturing world is on the brink of a major shift. As hands-on trade skills fade and society grows more accustomed to a throwaway mindset, the sector faces both challenges and opportunity. With fewer young workers picking up tools and more production moving offshore, the industry is being pushed to evolve. The path forward? Automation. By embracing advanced technologies—from PLC programming to high-level technical roles—U.S. manufacturers have a chance to reclaim competitiveness and bring production back home.
As modern manufacturing is increasingly integrated with technology like automation, robotics, AI, and data analytics. This has transformed the nature of factory workers, moving away from brute-force assembly to roles requiring technical expertise, problem-solving, and digital literacy, but the potential payoff is a stronger, more resilient domestic workforce.
The changes I think we're going to see in the manufacturing world is probably a growth in automation. The trades, unfortunately, seem to be going away. The kids coming out of school today are not typically working on their equipment. The society that we've come into contact with is now a throwaway society.
So, you're not fixing your bicycle, you're not repairing your washing machine, you're… So those skills are kind of falling off, and unfortunately, there's not a lot of people that actually want to work with their hands and continue to grow the manufacturing space.
So, we're offshoring a lot of things to different countries, but my hope is that we start to bring things back to the United States. And the only way to be competitive with that is through automation. So, the hope, and I think what's going to happen, is you're going to see a lot more manufacturing, and the technical jobs are going to be more PLC programming, high-level technicians, and that's still going to be a nice salary for them.
And it's going to be, hopefully, improving manufacturing back to the United States because I think offshoring everything that we did over the last few years has actually hurt us, unfortunately.