Powder coating is a baby boomer. In 1962,
the electrostatic spray process, developed by
Pieter de Lange, entered the industrial finishing
marketplace kicking and screaming, and by the late
1970s and early 1980s the technology was growing up
quickly. Powder matured as a technology in the 1990s
and celebrated its 50th birthday a few years ago.
The growth of powder parallels the careers of many
industrial engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and visionaries
whose own careers were tied to the trajectory
of powder coatings. Now, many of those who have
grown up alongside powder coatings are looking to
take some time off, play a little golf and go fishing.
Where does that leave powder? “Brain Drain” is
a term used to describe the geographic migration of
talented people from one country to another. The
emigration of intelligent, well-educated individuals for
better pay or conditions causes their places of origin
to lose skilled people, or “brains.” A different kind
of Brain Drain is threatening powder coatings. It is a
demographic version of the phenomenon.
While old-timers can boast that, “I was powder
before powder was cool,” fewer youngsters seem attracted
to powder to fill their shoes. This imbalance is
producing a widening skills gap in our industry. This
problem is not unique to powder coating, but applies
to traditional manufacturing jobs as well.
Consider the following facts:
- Almost 80 percent of the current manufacturing
workforce is between the ages of 45 and 65.
- One-third are between 55 and 64 years old and starting
to look toward retirement.
- More than three-quarters of manufacturers have fewer
than 25 percent of their employees under age 30,
and most don’t see that changing anytime soon.
- Fifty-two percent of teens have little or no interest in
a manufacturing career and another 21 percent are
ambivalent.
- Manufacturing ranks “dead last” as a career choice
for U.S. citizens between the ages of 18 and 24.
According to a 2015 survey by the Manufacturing
Institute, the skills gap in manufacturing is only
expected to swell in the future (Figure 1). The Institute
concludes that “the changing nature of work, the
ensuing need for improved workforce skills, and the
imminent retirement of baby boomers (born between
1946 and 1964) has become a focal point for companies
as they consider the resulting business impact.”
Retaining, hiring, and developing a skilled workforce
will be increasingly difficult in the face of aging demographics.
The U.S. Department of Labor statistics show that
53 percent of workers at companies who apply paint
and coatings are over 45 years old, and 49 percent of
workers at suppliers of paint and paint related equipment
are in this same age range. In our own survey of
nearly two dozen member companies of the Powder
Coating Institute, nearly 58 percent report they have
top management and engineering employees who are
likely to retire within the next 5 years, and over 50
percent of these companies report they do not have
sufficiently trained replacements to take over their
responsibilities.
Why does manufacturing and powder coating,
in particular, have a problem attracting new talent?
While the answer to this question might be complex,
there are three problems that exacerbate the situation:
an image problem, a location problem, and an education
problem.
Powder Has an Image Problem
The Manufacturing Institute suggests that “young
people want to solve problems, start businesses, make
waves, and make money. But, to accomplish those
things, they think they have to be surgeons, lawyers,
or Steve Jobs. They don’t understand that manufacturing
careers offer real opportunities to do work that
saves lives, puts men on mars, and creates our quality
of life.”
According to Gerald Shankel, president of The
Foundation of the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association,
“industry must generate interest among young
people to consider manufacturing and convey that
it’s both honorable and profitable to work with your hands. The skilled jobs to fill will not only require
workers to operate the most advanced, sophisticated
equipment, such as robotics and lasers, it will require
the kind of high tech, computer skills young people
love to apply.”
Powder coating needs a makeover. When inputting
“what’s new in powder coating” into the Google search
engine, the first result on the list is a 1997 article
authored by a powder formulator that’s no longer
around. A survey of YouTube videos is similarly disappointing.
An aspiring engineer trying to decide what
career looks exciting will find videos from tinkerers
building a convection oven from junkyard parts or a
converted toaster, rather than cutting edge work in
powder coating.
A recent Forbes magazine study reported that 10
percent of those entering the workforce voted “interesting
job content” as the most important factor
in selecting a first job, and 44 percent ranked it as “a top five” requirement. The importance of challenging
work is even stronger among those with greater skills.
A 2013 MIT Sloan School of Management report survey
shows that among those graduates for whom there
may be more choices about where to work, the vast
majority of those with advanced degrees rated “challenging/and
or interesting work” and “the opportunity
to learn new things” as vital factors in their career
decisions (see Figure 2).
Powder Has a Location Problem
The 1919 song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on
the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” considered the
concern that American soldiers from rural environments
would not want to return to farm life after experiencing
the exciting European city life after World
War I.
Powder coating continues to occupy the industrial
rust belt of America. Our own survey of Powder
Coating Institute (PCI) members reveals that jobs in
powder coatings are not located in those booming
locations like San Francisco, Boston, the research
triangle, Southern Texas, Portland and Seattle, which
attract engineers and scientists to other high-tech
industries (Figure 3), but rather in the more mature
manufacturing rust belt, rural areas of the Midwest,
and rural southern towns in Alabama, Georgia and
South Carolina—areas that saw a surge in automotive
manufacturing as OEMs and tier suppliers fled Detroit for lower cost labor in the late 1990s and early 2000s
(Figure 4).
This observation is supported by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Rural Manufacturing Study,
which found that “rural high-adopters are somewhat
more likely to report problems with the quality of
available labor, but nearly twice as likely to report
problems with attracting managers and professionals.”
An August 2015 study by Aaron Renn, a senior fellow
of the Manhattan Institute, found that the overwhelming
majority of rustbelt cities from Pittsburgh to
Dayton continue to lose jobs to “cool cities” elsewhere
in the United States. This might mean that suppliers
and users of powder coatings may need to find a new
home. As a December 2014 article in Entrepreneur
magazine noted, “Rust Belt cities were built during the
earlier years of the industrial revolution. While it’s true
that the United States is experiencing a manufacturing
renaissance, globalization means that the industry will
never rebound back to the way it once was and that’s
OK. Cities need to embrace this new normal and find
a different niche to become known for.”
Powder Has an Education Problem
The wave of retirement in the manufacturing sector
could plague U.S. companies with skill shortages and
high costs of replacing veteran employees. A new
study by the Sloan Center on Aging & Work reports
that the top three concerns of manufacturing employers
were recruiting competent job applicants (45.1
percent), the low skill levels of new employees (30.3 percent), and knowledge transfer from experienced to
less experienced employees (28.8 percent).
Our own survey of PCI members echoed these
concerns. Figure 5 illustrates the problem. The dominant
source of technical training for these suppliers is
on-the-job training that occurs from worker’s cohorts.
Although industry-held seminars are a distant second
when it comes to training, one manufacturer observed
that the problem with the seminars is that they focus
on the most basic knowledge. “When we send engineers
to these events, we often hear that the attendees
didn’t learn much. In fact, many of them could probably
teach most of seminars they attend.”
A conspicuous finding of this study is that a tiny
fraction of powder coating knowledge comes from
formal education. Only 8 percent of relevant skills
come from college education. While formal education
is much more common for the chemistry side of the
powder business, it’s much less common for those involved
in equipment design and process engineering.
According to Purdue University’s College of Technology,
of 108 top-ranked, very high-intensive research
universities in this country, only five actually teach
applied engineering: Arizona State University, Purdue,
Texas A&M, University of Cincinnati, and University
of Houston.
What We Can Do
The solution to Brain Drain is neither simple nor
straightforward. Some of the forces at work are tectonic
shifts in demographics, tastes, and our DNA. What attracted new engineers and chemists at a time when
few had access to computers may not have the same
appeal in a time when everyone can wear a computer
on their wrist. However, there may be room for improvement,
and here are some steps that might help
ward off the coming knowledge gap:
- Market our technology more effectively. There
are some great stories about powder coating. Our
publications, social media, and company web sites
should tell stories about smart coatings that react
to external stimuli, antimicrobial powders, energy
efficient coatings that selectively reflect infrared,
UV curable powder coatings, self-healing coatings,
CARC powder coatings.
- Fund creative and high-tech innovation. Economic
hardships in the powder business, as early as 2001,
caused suppliers to “tighten their belts,” downsize,
and focus on core capabilities—sometimes at the
detriment to innovation. Manufacturers can be
notoriously tight-fisted when it comes to funding
new ideas. Perhaps we can learn from other industries
that have succeeded in fostering a culture of
innovation. The scholar Everett M. Rogers (who was born on a farm in Carroll, Iowa) is best known
for originating the diffusion of innovations theory
defined the idea of a skunkworks project as “an
especially enriched environment that is intended
to help a small group of individuals design a new
idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.”
The success of the skunkworks mentality has led
to breakthroughs from Post-It pads to computer
hardware and software. Companies might change
the calculus they use for computing the returns to
innovation to include not only those direct benefits
of innovative products, but how funding a culture
of innovation attracts talented workers seek
- Locate new facilities in high-technology “spillover”
areas. According to the National Association of
Manufacturers, knowledge is what allows metros
to generate good high-wage jobs. “Across America,
high-wage jobs are closely related to key markers of
regional knowledge economies: the share of adults
who are college grads; the share of the workforce in
professional, technical, and creative jobs; the levels
of innovation and venture-capital investment.” As companies look to expand,
they must consider establishing
a presence in higher-wage, but
more technology-rich cities that
compete for young talent.
- Work with colleges and universities
to develop talent. Industry
and academia, even at the grammar
school and high school level,
need to partner up to provide
students with better understanding
of the opportunities in manufacturing
to make a difference
in people’s lives. Colleges and
universities need to expand their
offerings particularly in those applied
and industrial engineering
disciplines which provide solid
formal training.
- Raise the bar on education
within the industry. In the past,
industry suppliers dedicated significant
resources to education.
With tighter budgets and the
loss of experienced staff, this has
become less commonplace. With
less access to information from
within their own organizations,
and with little formal education,
workers turn to the industry for
education. At present there are
too few opportunities that offer
consistently high-quality intermediate
and advanced content.
Industry should band together
and encourage the development
of more resources beyond the entry-level
skills required to compensate
for the loss of experience
through worker attrition.
Fortunately, it is not too late to
alter our trajectory. Many of the
PCI corporate members we surveyed
recognize the threat of the
widening skills gap and the importance
of addressing the problem. Industry events like the recent
Powder Coating Symposium that
provide a forum for exchanging indepth
knowledge, and publications
like Powder Coated Tough, which
show off the innovation in our
industry, can help move the needle;
but making a more substantial
impact will require a more focused,
industry-wide effort.
Paul Mills is a marketing and business
development consultant to industry chemistry
and equipment suppliers. He has been a
writer for the powder coating industry since
1994. Paul can be reached at 440-570-5228
or via email at pmillsoh@aol.com.