The Additive Advantage Podcast
Sep 1, 2026 · 1 hr 30 min · 15 segments
The workforce gap is one of the biggest challenges facing advanced manufacturing. But what if we’ve been treating it as someone else’s problem? In the first episode of our new workforce series, our…
Matt KirchnerGuestShon AndersonHostDani MasonHostWell, maybe the right spot to jump in is, you've spent decades working at the intersection of manufacturing, education, workforce development.
From your perspective, what's different now that would make you say, we need to change the conversation about the future of manufacturing talent?
And in my days of manufacturing, we had a lot of electromechanical technology, but it was mainly driven by programmable logic controllers, analog sensors, mechanical drives.
motor and motion control, and basic ACDC electricity, none of that is going away.
But as we move more and more into this field of automation, of robotics, of smart sensors and smart devices, of cloud-based technologies, of data sets that we're now analyzing with artificial intelligence to find patterns in them to improve our processes.
The other thing that is changing is just the realities of the demographics in the workforce.
And as I can just say it anecdotally, I walk through a lot of manufacturing plants and the people that are out on the floor.
doing the work, 55 years old, 60 years old, well, guess what? It's not going to be long before those people start deciding that it's time for them to retire.
And so as people move out of the workforce, we're creating this gap that we really need to fill in terms of having that skilled talent.
So all of our, what we call tribal knowledge, all of the information that that it gets amassed in an individual over the course of time.
They understand how those problems manifest themselves across the entire manufacturing process.
A lot of that knowledge is walking out the door with people who are reaching retirement age and rightly so going on to greener pastures or at least different ones.
And so that's creating a huge vacuum in manufacturing in terms of skilled talent.
I just read one last week, Sean, about... people that have been out of work for six months or more literally falling out of the calculation of unemployment because they're no longer looking for work.
Well, maybe the right spot to jump in is, you've spent decades working at the intersection of manufacturing, education, workforce development.
From your perspective, what's different now that would make you say, we need to change the conversation about the future of manufacturing talent?
And in my days of manufacturing, we had a lot of electromechanical technology, but it was mainly driven by programmable logic controllers, analog sensors, mechanical drives.
motor and motion control, and basic ACDC electricity, none of that is going away.
But as we move more and more into this field of automation, of robotics, of smart sensors and smart devices, of cloud-based technologies, of data sets that we're now analyzing with artificial intelligence to find patterns in them to improve our processes.
The other thing that is changing is just the realities of the demographics in the workforce.
And as I can just say it anecdotally, I walk through a lot of manufacturing plants and the people that are out on the floor.
doing the work, 55 years old, 60 years old, well, guess what? It's not going to be long before those people start deciding that it's time for them to retire.
And so as people move out of the workforce, we're creating this gap that we really need to fill in terms of having that skilled talent.
So all of our, what we call tribal knowledge, all of the information that that it gets amassed in an individual over the course of time.
They understand how those problems manifest themselves across the entire manufacturing process.
A lot of that knowledge is walking out the door with people who are reaching retirement age and rightly so going on to greener pastures or at least different ones.
And so that's creating a huge vacuum in manufacturing in terms of skilled talent.
I just read one last week, Sean, about... people that have been out of work for six months or more literally falling out of the calculation of unemployment because they're no longer looking for work.
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