Ethan Karp Gets Frank: Who Will Run the Factory of the Future?

Miguel's dream has come true and he does own his own business.

Why did he succeed?

Miguel arrived with curiosity, an instinct to help.

He didn't take the sort of baggage of, oh, this is dead end or dirty.

He just looked at it as what it was, an opportunity to learn.

If companies treat people like I'm sure those mentors of Miguel's treated him with a vision of his future promise, and how he can start somewhere and grow, and that he would be that owner that he had the drive to be, when companies look at their current employees in that future way, and so many more are doing that, that truly will propel the next generation of manufacturers and is what makes manufacturing such a great career to enter because of all of the possibilities of upward momentum that exist today.

But how do you create that path when those summer jobs for 17-year-olds and those jobs for people right out of college or right out of high school are not there anymore, when they're all advanced technician jobs running these incredible robots and machines?

Look, companies still need that first rung.

It just has to be accelerated.

You need to bring somebody in and say, OK, you're an intern over the summer.

And yeah, there's some things you can do.

Heck, we run these apprenticeship programs.

There are some things you can do now, but we have to get you accelerated so you can run that machine not three years from now, but a month from now.

So, of course, there's a learning and there's a curve that you go in coming in.

That's the investment manufacturers are having to make to build their own, creating intentionally what those look like, what that accelerated pay track looks like.

So interesting.

Miguel found the path.

He stayed on it.

You're arguing companies have to amend the path, invest in the path for today's technology driven environment.

But we talked to one guest who said many companies never had a path.

Right.

They missed the path entirely.

And that was Felix Brooke, former magnet chair, chair of Reflection Point, retired McKinsey consultant and one of your mentors.

Here's what he had to say.