Manufacturing and construction industries are hiring

At Ampoule’s manufacturing facility in the Bay Area, employees work on the floor alongside robots to manufacture battery packs and other components for the company’s EV battery replacement technology.

The work is clean, high-tech and skilled, all of which are key recruiting points as the company looks to further its position in the year ahead. The company hopes to double its manufacturing workforce by 100 by the end of the year.

It can be difficult to find people trained to do these jobs.

Ampoule is from Daimler Stellantis to Uber Replace a degraded EV battery with a fully charged battery and get your electric vehicle back on the road quickly. The company expects business to accelerate as the U.S. works toward its renewable energy goals.

Ampoules are facing a problem that has plagued many manufacturers for years: a lack of skilled labor. The company is looking for experienced workers working with high-voltage machinery and complex robotics.that too Fill low-skilled positions.

“The important thing is that the machines are more sophisticated and the manufacturing is more automated,” Ampoule CEO Khaled Hassouna told CNBC. “So we expect to see more people managing the processes, more people actually doing the manufacturing, and that naturally means the jobs will become more sophisticated.”

The company is taking matters into its own hands. Ample operates apprenticeship partnerships with City College of San Francisco, Laney College, and College of San Mateo, which were created as a result of the Inflation Control Act.

These training programs give the company confidence that it can achieve its growth goals. He said some of the positions Ample is recruiting for don’t require a college degree.

“We realized that we could rely on community colleges to provide that. You don’t have to go to college for two years to get started, but you can actually take classes to fundamentally increase your ability to do the job.” There are classes to do,’ that really work, that can be done safely, that can be more effective,” Hassona said.

As Ampoule expands its hiring, it is countering a slowdown in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and around the world. The sector added only 12,000 net jobs in 2023 due to a variety of reasons, including last fall’s auto workers strike, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The U.S. manufacturing industry added 23,000 jobs in January, but the number of job openings in the industry in December was 601,000, the highest level in three months, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. became. The industry is expected to have a tough year this year as companies struggle to find the right staff amid an uncertain economic outlook and a tight job market, according to an industry outlook from consulting firm Deloitte.

As baby boomers retire and young people choose between college and the workforce, companies that rely on industry’s blue-collar workers face challenges in finding qualified job candidates. The Manufacturing Association, an industry advocacy group, said in 2021 that about 4 million jobs in the industry need to be filled by 2030, and that if workers do not pursue modern manufacturing, this number will be lost by then. It predicted that more than 2 million jobs in the industry may go unfilled. career.

“The biggest misconception about manufacturing is what modern manufacturing actually looks like. People just don’t know,” says Carolyn Lee, president of the Manufacturing Association. “They think it’s outdated or that you just come in and do one job. They don’t know that today’s modern manufacturing is all about technology.”

The group is expanding its recruiting efforts to workers of all demographics, backgrounds and ages, and has even begun to educate middle school-aged children about opportunities in the industry.

Manufacturing jobs are likely to grow even more in the coming years as funding from the CHIPS Act, the Suppression of Inflation Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Agreement take a hit. But growth will exceed that.

Construction employment is also increasing, with the sector adding an average of 16,000 jobs per month in 2023. Manufacturing-related construction employment also increased last year. Industry watchers expect further developments.

Ben Brubeck, vice president of regulatory, labor and national affairs for the industry group Associated Builders and Contractors, said federal funding related to construction and manufacturing projects could amount to “hundreds of billions of dollars over the next four to five years. It will be,” he said. “And that’s going to have a huge impact on skilled labor and the shortages that we’re currently facing.”

The construction industry will need to hire an estimated 501,000 additional workers on top of its normal hiring pace in 2024 to meet labor demand, according to a proprietary model developed by the industry group.

Smaller employers are likely to feel the industry’s employment strain more meaningfully. The National Federation of Independent Business reported in December that quality of labor ranked among the top three concerns for small business owners, behind inflation.

Thirty-three percent of all small business owners surveyed had skilled labor vacancies, and the organization said employment challenges were most acute in the construction and transportation sectors.

To alleviate employment problems, companies aim to recruit young workers and train them to work in manufacturing and construction. This is something that the high school is also working on in a unique way.

At South San Francisco High School, a course designed as a traditional woodworking elective has been transformed into a two-year trade course for the construction industry.

“In fact, we started by building birdhouses and ended up learning how to form the walls and roofs of buildings. So what do students need to be competitive in the working environment and how to do that? It started with understanding what we can do. How do we help them get there?” Jason Block, Director of Innovation, Community Outreach, and Special Projects for the South San Francisco High School District Meyer said: “We are focused on making sure our students are not only college-ready, but career-ready.”