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Rebuilding the U.S. Trade, Manufacturing, and Industrial Skills Workforce: A National Imperative and Call to Action

  • Dean Brabant
  • Aug 28, 2025
  • 6 min read

The Crisis: America's 1.9 Million Missing Workers


By 2033, America needs to find 1.9 million new manufacturing workers—that's equivalent to hiring the entire population of Silicon Valley and training them for factory floors instead of tech startups. The difference? These workers don't exist yet.

A report from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute warns that manufacturers may need up to 3.8 million new workers by 2033, with roughly half of those positions likely to remain unfilled if the current labor crisis is not addressed.


Reindustrializing the United States economy and intensifying initiatives to bring manufacturing and production domestically encounter a substantial obstacle. The nation currently faces a shortage of workers and skills necessary for constructing infrastructure, producing machinery, and operating factory lines to achieve this objective. There are notable shortages in critical labor sectors, including trades, manufacturing, and industrial skills. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported 415,000 vacant manufacturing positions in June 2025, underscoring a significant mismatch between labor demand and supply.


Our skilled workforce has significantly diminished compared to two decades ago. Aidan Madigan-Curtis, in her research for the article, "What Would It Take to Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing? Part 1: America’s Structural Headwinds," poignantly states, “nearly 5 million additional workers would be needed for manufacturing jobs if the U.S. manufacturing workforce had grown at the same rate U.S. goods consumption grew over the past 20 years.” In other words, if the entire volume of goods consumed in the United States were produced domestically, an additional 5 million manufacturing jobs would be required today.


This provides a clear and effective estimate of our existing labor deficit. Undoubtedly, trade remains an essential component of economic stability. The United States will continue to import a portion of goods and services to meet the needs of consumers and businesses. As articulated in the initial paragraph, the Manufacturing Institute projects that the United States will require 3.8 million manufacturing workers by 2033. The data presented above, along with the BLS report, clearly highlights our current labor shortage within the manufacturing sector and suggests that demand is escalating to meet forthcoming needs. This situation accurately reflects the prevailing conditions of our economic and industrial framework.


Addressing the complex economic and structural issues within our industrial base, including the workforce gap characterized by a lack of appropriate skills, necessitates a comprehensive national effort. Daniel Bob, a writer for The National Interest, stated in his article, "Why the Defense Industrial Base Is So Hard to Fix," that "it requires rebuilding the workforce pipeline through sustained investment in vocational education, apprenticeships, and regional partnerships with manufacturing centers.”


The American industrial ecosystem relies on collaboration and cooperation among its stakeholders to achieve its industrialization objectives over the next twenty years. Manufacturers and builders cannot merely wait for workers to enter the labor pipeline to fulfill their industrial or trade requirements; instead, they must actively engage in outside workforce development. This necessitates partnerships between the public and private sectors, collaboration between academia and industry, as well as government and corporate sponsorship and funding. 


The Federal Response: $300 Million and Growing


One seemingly obvious point is to invest in workforce development. There are many existing programs, but we need to scale them up quickly and add new programs. We must allocate public and private funding to programs that provide apprenticeships, certifications, and practical experience in emerging technologies. These initiatives are crucial for developing a talent pool that is both knowledgeable and skilled enough to drive innovation and enhance productivity.


The Pentagon's Four-Point Plan 


At the federal level, in 2023, the Department of Defense issued the National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS). This document is in alignment with the 2022 National Defense Strategy and reflects a federated and international approach involving allies and partners, aimed at establishing a “modernized defense industrial ecosystem.” The NDIS identifies four enduring priorities: resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, flexible acquisition, and economic deterrence. From a federal standpoint, flexible acquisition serves as a foundational element for enhancing supply chain resilience. Economic deterrence is derived from industrial onshoring, diversification of supply chains, and the augmentation of manufacturing capacity. The development, training, and expansion of the workforce underpin this strategic framework.  

 

Circling back to the NDIS, the DoD delineates its measures that support workforce development and invest in technologically advanced industrial skills. The NDIS states four objectives for Workforce Readiness:


1) Prepare the workforce for future technological innovation

2) Continue targeting defense-critical skill sets in manufacturing and STEM

3) Increase access to apprenticeship and internship programs

4) Destigmatize industrial careers


Figure 1:  Actions to Implement NDIS Objectives
Figure 1:  Actions to Implement NDIS Objectives

Programs in Action: From Auburn to New England

          

Several programs are implementing these NDIS actions. The National Imperative for Industrial Skills (NIIS) program office, located within the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy, manages an open Other Transaction Agreement through its Cornerstone Consortium that finances prototyping initiatives aimed at revitalizing industrial capabilities and restoring the United States' position as the global leader in high technology. NIIS serves as the overarching framework to coordinate integrated efforts among industry, academia, regional communities, and other government agencies to address the most urgent industrial workforce challenges. It has an annual investment profile of $300 million and is regarded as the flagship program strengthening the NDIS.


Figure 2: IBAS’s Industrial Skills Workforce Development Ecosystem Model
Figure 2: IBAS’s Industrial Skills Workforce Development Ecosystem Model

Success Stories: Real Programs, Real Results 


The Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) program, situated within the Innovation Capability and Modernization (ICAM) office under the auspices of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, oversees the NIIS portfolio, which encompasses various sectors within the workforce development ecosystem. Among these programs, the Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Manufacturing Systems (ICAMS) at Auburn University serves as a notable example. This initiative provides state-of-the-art equipment, facilities, and expertise to facilitate the training and education of students and industry professionals in advanced manufacturing technologies. The primary focus of ICAMS's efforts is to mitigate the barriers hindering the adoption of advanced manufacturing systems, such as Industry 4.0 technologies, particularly within small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises.


The SENEDIA (SE New England Defense Industry Alliance), encompassing six states, exemplifies a NIIS-supported initiative that promotes connectivity, cultivates partnerships, and unites leaders from industry and government. These representatives participate in some of the most innovative and advanced work in undersea technology, cybersecurity, and defense technologies. Another noteworthy initiative is the Texas Workforce Development Ecosystem (TWDE). The TWDE collaborates with industry, educational institutions, and government stakeholders to develop and offer training opportunities that cultivate a skilled manufacturing workforce for the industrial sector in Texas.


What Industry Must Do Now?


Make skills and jobs involving welding, robotics programming, data analytics, digital fluency, predictive maintenance, and lean manufacturing more appealing—be proactive in changing perceptions of trade and industrial (manufacturing) work. The world of manufacturing and trade jobs has undergone an appreciable shift over the past thirty years. However, we still face cultural stigmas that diminish and undermine these careers. Today’s labor force must act as programmers for advanced industrial machines, manage automated systems, and solve problems using system-wide data analysis, among a myriad of other skills and capabilities. 


Partner with local community colleges and regional industrial trades centers. Help them understand your workforce needs and the skills required. Offer apprenticeships, work-study programs, or internships for high school and trade school students. Additionally, build flexible work arrangements, foster a supportive and positive culture, and offer fair compensation. Create companies people want to work at and can rally around what they're producing.


Founders, emerging technologists, and builders—especially in the defense industrial sector—must prioritize investing in and supporting the broad development of trade and industrial skills as part of their long-term strategic plans. A future worker might not work for you and could even be employed by a competitor. However, the benefit of having enough skilled labor to support manufacturing and industrial growth greatly outweighs the cost of training someone who is currently employed elsewhere. The future of industrial work involves change and specialization. The companies that succeed will be those that see this shift not as a threat but as an opportunity to invest in their people, improve processes, and develop a workforce prepared for a more complex, connected, and automated world.


We need to rebuild in America once more. We rose to the challenge in World War II, and we can and must do it again today. We’re in a strategic international competition like no other time in history, aiming to reindustrialize and regain industrial dominance. Daniel Bob concluded his article with a powerful statement repeated here: “Strategic competition with China is not only about ships, planes, and missiles—it is also about who can produce, replenish, and endure. In such a contest, industrial strength is national strength.”

 

 

The author, Dean Brabant, also known as “Dino,” serves as the President of Federal Services at Illumina Consulting LLC, an organization dedicated to establishing strategic connections between industry leaders and defense requirements. 

 

List of websites:

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES): https://tees.tamu.edu/workforce-development/index.html

Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet): https://acenetworks.org/ (Not mentioned in the article, but a good example of a NIIS-supported program)

Cornerstone Consortium: https://cornerstone.army.mil/. Current opportunities to submit workforce whitepapers exist under the OTA Strengthening America’s Manufacturing – and Defense Industrial Base (SAMDIB)

 
 
 

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