You know all about millennials. You understand that they make up the biggest portion of the workforce, that they expect more guidance and clearer paths for career development, that they’re impacting every industry from paper products to farming.

Manufacturing is no exception. The millennial generation is looking at the manufacturing industry in new ways and expecting it to learn new tricks.

If you spent five minutes in the exposition hall at the ASA’s 2017 Staffing World Expo & Conference last month, you would very quickly get a sense of what products are being purchased by staffing firms.   

Throughout the hall, there was a cluster of background check companies, a pocket of drug testing companies, the major ATS players, the companies that make sure you’re in compliance and, of course, the behemoths of sourcing occupying mammoth booths. Staffing, for the past 30 years, has remained simple in this way. Find candidates, make sure they check the boxes, place them, rinse, repeat. No fluff.  Nothing extraneous. No vendors selling flashy website upgrades, no internal talent profiling, even very few assessments.

Mark Twain once famously said, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”  American manufacturing certainly seems able to make that claim.

After more than a decade of doomsayers touting the rise of Asian manufacturing, or Mexican manufacturing, or whatever location to which offshoring seems to start flowing next, IndustryWeek reported that American manufacturing is growing at its fastest pace in 13 years.¹

When most people hear the word “apprenticeship,” they envision the model that Europe has used for hundreds of years – young adults choosing to make horseshoes on an anvil rather than enrolling in higher education – substituting on the job learning for formal education. This Game of Thrones-like image is a completely outdated view on apprenticeship that holds back its development. The modern, American incarnation of apprenticeship, which is experiencing a renaissance in a world of severe labor shortages in skilled trades, differs in three crucial ways from the stereotype.

Earlier this week, President Trump announced his intention to expand apprenticeship programs as the cornerstone of his labor policy.¹ He clearly sees apprenticeship as a skills gap solution – and not just a way to hire an assistant in front of a national audience.

The ASU GSV Summit always acts as a great set of meteorological instruments used to measure trends across the edtech sector. It gauges hot and cold like a thermometer and which direction the wind is blowing like an anemometer. This year’s conference showed that the tectonic plates of edtech have shifted…seismically.