BPO Elite Blog Post #9 – It’s Time to Bring Manufacturing Back to the U.S.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/its_time_to_bring_manufacturin.html

To me this is the biggest threat to a manufacturing recovery… “Local talent and skills are essential to productivity and innovation. Long-term depletion of manufacturing skills will make it hard to reverse the trend.” We’ve gutted our education system and nothing going on in Washington or even the state capitals right now sounds like a solution to this issue! My previous post about the state of education speaks to that view.
So if the solution doesn’t come directly from the government, then it has to come from the businesses themselves. Ford did this. But how many big corporations can do this? Based on the recent NYT article, Apple surely is not in a position to that on a significant scale. The author asks if this is a trend or an anomaly. I sure hope it’s a trend, but in a lot of industries I fear it’s not.
As an educator, a businessman and an entrepreneur, I am constantly thinking about how best to make a living but empowering others with skills then need to succeed. Whether they are my students, my interns or my clients, I am always hopeful that my interactions with them leave them in better place than they were in before they met me. However, I have to also always be mindful of the costs of my doing business. Like any business leader, I want to provide high quality, but at a cost that is both affordable and still generates revenue.
SO how do we work within the confines of the current educational landscape of the U.S. to provide skills to workers here? That is the dilemma that we face and one that I deeply wish we were seeing more answers to.