Our workforce is undergoing major changes, especially in talent management and retention. Understanding and addressing these shifts will be our next mission.

Manufacturers face complex challenges, including attracting and retaining labor and adapting to a volatile market. Skilled human labor remains crucial despite advancements in automation.

Automation helps move skilled workers from repetitive tasks to more important roles, experts say. It’s essential to train them to use these new technologies properly.

Ask a quality engineer how they were introduced to metrology or inspection, and they’ll often answer that it wasn’t during their coursework, but in the field. It reflects the manufacturing world’s problem with visibility and messaging, and an important insight into why the term “skills gap” has been a buzzword for several years.

When I was 19 years old, my first paying job in the nondestructive testing (NDT) industry was inspecting a weld repair on a water intake pipe at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire.