Clogging the brain drain: Growing the composites workforce in a pandemic era

Even before the coronavirus pandemic struck, the composites industry had a workforce problem. Pre-COVID-19, it was nearly impossible to attend a trade show or conference and not hear about challenges faced by composites fabricators in finding people to fill open technical positions, particularly engineering positions. The causes of this problem were fairly simple: Baby Boomers, who represent the largest generation in the workforce, were and still are in the midst of retirement, and composites manufacturing, being a relatively small subset of the overall manufacturing economy, had difficulty attracting young talent, especially if that young talent received little to no formal composites education while in college or technical school. 

Then, of course, the pandemic struck, and all of these challenges, which seemed daunting to begin with, became monumental. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Baby Boomers retiring in the U.S. more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, increasing from 1.5 million to 3.2 million people. That’s about 12,500 people every business day. On top of that, people close to retirement age also decided to hang it up at a higher-than-normal rate. In fact, according to Pew Research, people 55 and older, pre-COVID-19, were expanding their presence in the U.S. workforce; then, in 2020, they began to gradually leave the workforce. And then there’s the other end of the age spectrum: Many COVID- and Zoom-weary students — either graduating high school or already in college — decided in the last couple of years to take a gap year, thus forestalling their graduation and entry into the workforce. Finally, we can’t forget the (ongoing) Great Resignation, which has seen an unprecedented transfer of people and talent throughout the workforce.

Composites knowledge and experience are rare and precious.

There is a solution for any composites fabricator struggling to find people to do the work that needs to be done, and that is to adopt automation wherever possible to free up the staff on hand so they can do the work that only people can do. This is a real option. It’s also an expensive one, as automation requires investment in money, time and resources to get it up and running, programmed, integrated with your operations, etc. In this way, use of automation is less a stop-gap measure to meet a temporary lack of employees and more of a long-term manufacturing strategy. 

In any case, the use of automation does not change the value of the human person in a composites manufacturing environment. In most cases — in the composites industry and beyond — we don’t seek employees to just perform menial tasks. We need them to bring knowledge, critical thinking, curiosity, decision-making and other innate skills that add value to the whole enterprise, help make good parts and meet the needs of the customer. Over a period of years, the value of this human component compounds as we gain experience, learn new skills and develop professional and social connections. Thus, when an experienced person leaves for another job or retires, they take with them years of accumulated and invaluable knowledge, insight and understanding. You might replace this person by promoting within, or hiring from without, but replacing their value is difficult.

To meet this challenge, we in the composites industry have talked a lot about the necessity of spreading the Composites Gospel to college and high school students. Many composites fabricators have established educational cooperatives with local colleges and universities to develop training and re-training programs for prospective employees, and this has proven especially effective at building a “pipeline” of talent. More indirectly, we have implored university engineering departments the world over to integrate more composites-related instruction into their engineering curriculum. 

However, as much as we want and need young people to come to the composites industry, it would be more beneficial if we captured the knowledge of experienced employees before they left. There are many ways to do this, ranging from cataloging the skills of your best employees to building an internal knowledge database or offering phased retirement so as to allow organized knowledge transfer to the next generation of employees. The bottom line is that composites knowledge and experience are rare and precious, and resources that should be jealously retained, cultivated and spread throughout our businesses.