POSTED ON 3/29/2019 – The world’s population is aging. In 1994, adults at or above 55 years of age were just 12 percent of the U.S. workforce; by 2024, that’s expected to more than double. By the 2030s, retirees will outnumber children and teens below 18 for the first time in America, a fact that holds true across much of the developed world. And when those workers retire, they take their decades of experience with them. And according to a 2018 study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, by 2028, those retiring workers will have left behind 2.4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs at a cost to the US economy of $2.5 trillion.
That’s why Mazak has spent decades perfecting its human-machine interfaces (HMI), seeking at every opportunity to simplify the operation of our machines and streamline the learning process for new operators. This effort has included everything from new machine controls to the Progressive Learning program we offer at Technology and Technical Centers across North America. Perhaps the most important element of our mission to fill the skills gap, however, is MAZATROL, the industry’s leading conversational programming language for CNC machining.
In previous years, middle and high school shop classes were part of the core curriculum, classes in which students gained the skills they needed to thrive in a manufacturing-dominated economy. But today’s manufacturing professionals typically come from backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math – the so-called “STEM” fields – and have the necessary training to take on industry or job-specific continuing education.