Swift Coat is a small Phoenix startup that makes anti-reflective coated glass for satellites. Its CEO, Peter Firth, plans to add two or three workers by the end of the year. All of them will need an engineering degree.
The Journal's Konrad Putzier reports that U.S. manufacturers have added 72,000 workers since December. After years of shrinking factory payrolls, that's welcome news. The mix has changed, though. Labor Department data show factories cut 244,000 production jobs, like assemblers and machine operators, from 2015 to 2025. In the same stretch, they added 358,000 jobs in management and in business and financial work. Automation is a big reason. A robot can load a machine, but someone has to keep it running and make sense of the data it throws off.
Swift has seven full-time workers. They include a physics Ph.D., two people with master's degrees in mechanical engineering and one with a bachelor's in chemical engineering. Three technicians work the shop floor. One has a two-year associate degree, one took some college classes, and all three have experience. Firth told the Journal that when everything works, "I could pull my mom in and she could do the work." He hires people to head off problems and catch the ones that slip through. Swift is now building a highly automated line, with robots loading and unloading samples. Where it might have hired five technicians, Firth says it may now hire one technician and two engineers, at higher pay. As he put it, "We're not necessarily spending less on people."
Who gets in the door
The fields adding workers this year are knowledge-heavy ones, like aerospace, computers, electrical equipment and heating and cooling systems. Older lines of work, like furniture making, keep shrinking. Census Bureau data show more than half of airplane-factory workers have at least a bachelor's degree. A LinkedIn analysis finds chipmakers hire college grads more often than other factories do. Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute, says the higher-skill jobs pay better and often involve less drudgery. Susan Helper at Case Western worries about who gets access to them. A high-school diploma alone opens fewer factory doors than it used to. Industry groups are trying to train people sooner. The trade group SME has about 125 people in its workforce-development division. It sends drone-coding kits and 3-D printers to middle schools. Its CEO, Jeannine Kunz, says every corner of manufacturing is short of skilled people.
Our read
This is a Career story, and an education-funding one. More and more, the factory job is a technician with an associate degree or an engineer with a four-year one. That changes the math for a family saving for school. A 529 plan can pay for community college and many certificate programs at eligible schools, not just a four-year campus. A two-year engineering-tech or robotics-maintenance degree usually costs a fraction of a bachelor's. It also leads into an industry whose own trade group says it can't find enough people. For a worker already on the floor, the lesson comes from the other side. Swift hires experienced technicians because they catch problems. In our view, experience plus a credential beats either one alone.
The thing in your own plan this story touches is the education line, the 529 or college fund you've set aside for a four-year school. This week, look up what a two-year engineering-technology program at your local community college costs. Find what its graduates earn, too, and set both numbers next to the four-year school's. Then open the 529 account and confirm the beneficiary and the goal amount still fit the plan. If the two-year path wins, the 529 money can still pay for it. You pack the raincoat before the clouds build, not after the first drop. If the two numbers surprise you, that's a good hour to spend with someone who runs these comparisons every week.