I looked into national voices for manufacturing and visited the NAM (National Association of Manufacturers), which has about 14,000 member companies employing around 13 million people. NAM advocates for manufacturers at the government level and has been focused on bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. since 2020.

1H2023 reshoring + foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements continued their record-breaking run.

Geopolitical risk and industrial policy drive reshoring and FDI announcements.

Reshoring + FDI manufacturing job announcements are continuing to outpace recent records, adding 101,500 jobs in 2023 Q1.

Reshoring + FDI job announcements in 2022 were at the highest rate ever recorded.

In 2021, the private and federal push for domestic supply of essential goods propelled reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements to a record high. Projections from Reshoring Initiative® 1H 2022 data show reshoring and FDI continuing these gains.

The Data Report discusses the trend and how reshoring will continue to be key to U.S. manufacturing and economic recovery.

As baby boomer engineers retire from manufacturing, younger generations aren’t rushing in to fill their shoes. Rapidly changing technology has created greater demand for new skills among shrinking pools of talent, just as reshoring efforts promise to make domestic manufacturing even more robust.
This is why the field’s well-documented skills gap will only widen.

Quality is the most frequently cited reason for reshoring manufacturing to the United States. According to the Reshoring Initiative’s 2017 Data Report, quality cost ranked number one as the most frequently mentioned negative factor experienced offshore from 2010 through 2017.

Combined reshoring and FDI jobs were up 122% compared to unrevised 2016 totals and 52% compared to revised 2016 totals.