November 30, 2023 How To Build Good Manufacturing Training Programs

Insufficiently skilled workers are killing the manufacturing industry. Here are some tips for engaging manufacturing training programs.

by Christopher Pappas, Founder of eLearning Industry

If you’re in the manufacturing industry, you must already know there’s a huge gap between needed talent and what you can find in the labor market. Unfortunately, this talent gap will keep increasing unless we do something about it. As a survival strategy, businesses in the manufacturing industry can rely on creating effective manufacturing training programs.

All you have to do is start taking small steps into implementing training in a modern, engaging way. Sure, such a transition can be hard to tackle, but if you take one step at a time, you’ll see that all can go smoothly.

Let’s determine which strategies and tools you can use to create out-of-the-box training for manufacturing talent.

Strategies and Tools To Leverage

As millions of Baby Boomers keep retiring, or about to, the manufacturing industry is bleeding out. And that means this once formidable sector is now losing talented, skilled, and experienced workers. The time to best recruit the future workforce for manufacturing is now. Manufacturing companies need a transfusion of new, even semi-skilled talent.

Like many other manufacturers in the U.S., your business might also be struggling with finding rightly skilled production workers. In fact, according to a recently published study by Deloitte, “6 out of 10 manufacturing positions cannot be filled because of talent shortage.” But you don’t want just anyone to fill an open position. Unfortunately, the current pool of manufacturing workers needs to have the necessary skills and industry experience to fill the open demand.

Here are some strategies to help you out with your manufacturing training programs:

Using Technology To Minimize Training Costs

To combat the skills gap in manufacturing, you must reimagine the training opportunities you offer. Manufacturers must accommodate new technology; to do that, they need to retrain their workforce. It’s not only about learning to use ‘soft skills’; it’s about enhancing the skills that automation can’t utilize.

There is no doubt that manufacturing training can be very expensive. Specialist skills can’t always be taught through online courses. You sometimes need to involve skilled trainers to ensure workplace safety. But we all know that Instructor-led training (ILT) is expensive.

If you don’t want to bring people from different locations together to train, you can utilize virtual training or even simulations to get the job done. Training the manufacturing workforce in digital skills is vital. To do so, look at the best LMS tools in the market.

Improve Onboarding & Offer Continuous Learning

Undoubtedly, retaining talent and reducing employee turnover is hard. Sure, hiring new employees is a solution, but you can’t achieve your goals if you can’t keep the talent you already have. Your main focus should be to retain skilled workers. That’s how you’ll avoid repeating lengthy, expensive training processes. It all starts with a good onboarding process and continuous learning. Your people want to have opportunities for professional development. It’s the solution to preventing productivity from stalling and paving the way to create the leaders of tomorrow.

So, make sure to engage your new hires with a constructive onboarding process. From explaining their job role and the working environment to analyzing health and safety matters, your employees have a lot to gain. And remember how important it is to identify what your business is looking for in a potential candidate. That way, you can tailor training for those who require it or even build career paths.

Leverage AI To Fix The Skills Gap

It saddens me to say there’s a disconnect between technological advancement in the workplace and the knowledge taught in education. And as the manufacturing sector keeps changing, companies need to invest in finding multi-skilled individuals.

While many feared that automation would mean the death of manual labor, the truth is that even more jobs are being created. AI and eLearning can help workers acquire the skills needed for the future of work. In fact, there are many AI powered LMS tools out there that suggest training based on each learner’s needs.

Key Takeaway

The digitization of the manufacturing industry is nigh. And your workers need to be able to keep up. If there’s one thing to remember from this article, it’s the fact that you need to prepare workers for smart factories and digital supply chains. 

Even if manufacturing lacks the sex appeal that other jobs have like, for example, tech, it’s a sector with the potential to entice exceptional employees. On that note, manufacturing companies have some hard thinking to do. For one, they must re-evaluate and re-design their HR strategies. That way, they’ll increase their chances to recruit, hire, and train new manufacturing employees.

Finding ways to identify and recruit candidates who have technical schooling and skills is vital. So, while establishing new relationships with local community colleges is a hell of an HR strategy, there’s more to be done.

By implementing a “grow on your own” approach, companies in the manufacturing sector can heavily invest in new hire training and development. Apart from that though, HR teams must also be willing to reach out to current employees. That’s a way to see if, within employee communities, or alumni associations, there might be hidden pools of untapped talent they can leverage.

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