Why I’ve Never Been More Optimistic About American Manufacturing

The skills gap can be filled.

Gorodenkoff – stock.adobe.com

I get asked a version of the same question constantly: is American manufacturing in trouble? I understand why people ask it. The headlines are full of worker shortages, aging plants, and companies scrambling to compete. But I spent this past week on the road talking to customers about these exact themes, and I keep walking away more fired up than I’ve been in years. Not because the challenges aren’t real — they are — but because the response to those challenges is one of the most exciting stories in the American economy right now, and almost nobody is telling it the right way.

The Real Number Behind the Workforce Gap

Let’s start with a number that stops people in their tracks. About seven years ago, U.S. manufacturers were spending roughly $2.26 billion a year on workforce training. Today, that figure is approaching $32 billion. That’s an entire industry admitting, with its checkbook, that the old model of “hire someone who already knows how to do this” is over.

Why is that happening? Because the products we build have gotten dramatically more complex. I’ve got a 1974 Bronco in my garage, and I can work on that thing all day — it’s purely mechanical. Put me in front of a 2026 Bronco and that job gets a lot harder. Now scale that same complexity jump across rockets, data centers, humanoid robots, and modern automotive assembly, and you start to see why training costs have gone up 22% in dollar terms since 2019. We’re not training people to do the same job better. We’re training them to do jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago.

And here’s the part that doesn’t make headlines: this isn’t just a story about big automakers and aerospace primes. Just over two-thirds of U.S. manufacturers are small shops — 15 people or fewer. Look at CNC machine shops alone: there are roughly 30,000 of them in this country, and more than 20,000 have 15 employees or less. The real training burden isn’t happening in a corporate L&D department. It’s happening on the shop floor of a family-owned business that’s been around for two or three generations. That’s where the cost is heaviest, and that’s where the opportunity is biggest.

We Don’t Have a Talent Problem — We Have a Story Problem

The story about manufacturing needs to be updated.

dsheremeta – stock.adobe.com

Here’s something I think about constantly: manufacturing still has the image of my uncle’s, my dad’s, my grandfather’s vocation. I was just in Dayton, Ohio, visiting a manufacturer and some customers, and if you walk the floor, it’s mostly the almost-retired.

My father-in-law built a company that made machines that physically moved concrete lane barriers back and forth on bridges and highways for traffic safety. Every time we drive over one of those, I point it out to my kids: grandpa built that. Once you start pointing at the physical world around you and asking who engineered it, that curiosity is contagious. Humanoids in a soccer stadium, satellites in orbit, the click you feel when you twist a volume knob in your car — someone had to manufacture every piece of that. I think that curiosity is innate in people. We’re builders at heart. The industry’s job is to keep reminding people of that.

The Precision Problem Nobody’s Talking About

Humanoid robot components including articulated hand parts, joint actuators, force sensors, and carbon fiber panels on a workbench

DigitalSpace – stock.adobe.com

Here’s the part of this story that deserves way more attention: building humanoid robots requires a level of manufacturing precision that’s incredible. The actuators that move an arm or a wrist often need to be held to 5 to 10 microns of tolerance. For scale, a human hair is roughly 50 to 100 microns thick — so we’re talking about components manufactured to a fraction of the width of a human hair, repeatedly, at volume. We are genuinely bumping up against the edge of what’s physically possible to manufacture at scale, and the supply chain to build at that tolerance simply doesn’t fully exist yet.

That’s the real, concrete case for reshoring — not a slogan, a tolerance stack. And I’d tell anyone worried we can’t compete with more mature manufacturing regions: don’t sleep on America. Thirty years ago, China wasn’t known for precision manufacturing. Go back further, to the years right after World War II, and Japan had a reputation as a low-cost region, not a high-precision one — and Japan transformed that reputation by choosing to. That transformation happens because a country chooses it. I believe America is choosing it right now, and I believe we’ll build this future on American soil — alongside strategic allies who help us get there faster, not instead of them.

Attitude Is Non-Negotiable. Everything Else Is Teachable.

Attitude is non-negotiable.

Gradual Growth – stock.adobe.com

If you’ve talked to me for more than ten minutes about hiring, you’ve heard this: you can’t coach attitude, but you can teach almost anything else. I look for people with a learning mindset and a track record of showing up — and that track record doesn’t have to come from a top university. It shows up in how someone’s involvement in the community, in sports, in volunteer commitments. Give people with that mindset a platform, and they’ll take care of your company and your customers.

That philosophy is also why I don’t think AI is going to replace manufacturing workers. People have been predicting robots would empty out the assembly line for decades, and there are still humans on the assembly line. In our own 2026 State of Manufacturing & Supply Chain Report — our 11th year running it — 97% of leaders told us AI is core to their workflows. I’d love to meet the other 3%. But AI is a tool in the toolchest, not a replacement for the chest. At Misumi, we give employees free access to LinkedIn Learning and other platforms specifically so curious people can teach themselves the next tool. I think we need that kind of help to hit the micron-level tolerances I mentioned earlier — AI as augmentation, not replacement.

Why I Walked Away Optimistic

Put it all together — the training investment, a better story for the next generation, the precision the future demands, a culture built to catch its own mistakes, a hiring philosophy built on attitude, and AI treated as a tool rather than a threat — and you get an industry that isn’t just surviving a hard moment. It’s rebuilding itself with more intention than it’s had in decades.

I’ve spent my career in this space, and I don’t say this lightly: manufacturing is having its most interesting decade in my lifetime. We just have to keep telling that story loudly enough for people to hear it.