U.S. manufacturing growth's bottleneck isn't caused by tariffs or access to capital. It’s people.

Deloitte's 2025 manufacturing outlook names skilled labor availability as the primary constraint on expansion. The industry needs 3.8 million workers by 2033. Current projections show nearly half those positions will stay empty.

The challenge extends beyond the volume of hiring. The example of Bridgeport, Connecticut shows what modern manufacturing actually looks like: teams of dozens, not thousands. Each person handles work that used to require multiple operators. One CNC machinist programs equipment three people used to run. A maintenance technician troubleshoots PLCs controlling entire production lines. Losing any one of them hits production the way that a critical machine going down does - and replacing them takes just as long, if not longer.

To be successful, you need to apply the same rigor and budget discipline to your human resource processes as you'd apply to a $2M equipment purchase.

What a Modern Workforce System Looks Like

Manufacturing companies do a great job of building systems to manage their capital equipment. For example, they schedule preventive maintenance and review equipment performance quarterly. Workforce systems get none of this.

Claire Hughes Johnson spent years scaling operations at Google and Stripe, but her conclusions apply beyond tech. She observed that the same bottleneck exists across industries: companies hit growth limits not because of capital or demand, but because their people systems can't keep pace. They couldn't hire fast enough, couldn't onboard effectively, couldn't develop supervisors into managers.

These constraints don’t get solved with incremental hiring fixes. They get solved by treating the workforce as a system. A workforce system has four components that work together: well-defined hiring pipelines, structured onboarding, supervisor development, and real-time feedback. Most manufacturers have pieces of these. Few have connected them into something that runs without constant executive intervention.

Four Places to Start Building

You don't have to build a workforce system all at once. It's better to focus and start small, then use the early successes to drive adoption at your firm. Here are 4 places where our clients often start building:

Hiring starts with treating candidates like customers. Job descriptions list requirements. Strong manufacturers don’t just screen candidates, they sell the work. They can articulate what success looks like in the first 30, 60, and 90 days, how the manager leads and supports the role, and what strong performance looks like when others who’ve done this job well. When that clarity is missing, the effects are felt later in slow ramp-up and early attrition.

The structure of the hiring process itself sends a signal to candidates. A well-run interview with consistent questions across candidates tells people you've thought about what success looks like. A disorganized series of conversations with whoever's available tells them you're winging it. Candidates read that as a preview of how the rest of the company runs.

The first 90 days need a framework, not a checklist. New hires should understand why the company exists, what their role accomplishes in the next month, and how daily operations actually work - not just where the break room is and which forms to sign. Most onboarding front-loads compliance paperwork and back-loads everything that actually matters. The new hire figures out the culture, expectations, and politics on their own over eight weeks of trial and error.

Flip that. Put a supervisor in place who walks the new hire through real work in the first week, not a training module. Give them a peer who's been in the role for a year, someone who can answer the questions people are embarrassed to ask their boss. Companies that structure these 90 days around learning instead of orientation see the difference in six-month retention numbers.

Promote supervisors only after you've trained them to supervise. Handing someone a team and expecting leadership is expensive (and naive) optimism. The best operator on your line knows the equipment, the process, and the product. Nothing about that prepares them to run a performance conversation or coach someone who's struggling without making it worse. These are different skills and they require different training.

You can actively invest in developing the people who want to be supervisors. That means teaching new supervisors to ask questions before giving answers, to watch a process before correcting it, and to give feedback that's specific enough to act on. None of this is intuitive, but we've seen that all of it is learnable.

Make feedback immediate. In manufacturing, waiting two weeks to address a problem means you've already paid for it in rework, scrap, and frustration. A quality issue caught on Monday and discussed on Friday has already produced four days of defective output. Yet many plants save feedback for scheduled reviews or wait until something goes wrong enough to force a conversation.

Feedback has to operate like safety protocols: built into the day, expected by everyone, and addressed immediately. This means having hard conversations instead of preserving temporary harmony. As operations leader Matt MacInnis puts it: “Withholding negative feedback is selfish because you prioritize your comfort over making teammates and the company better.” Teams don't resent feedback that helps them do better work today; they resent being left in the dark.

Conclusion

Manufacturing growth in the next decade will reward readiness, not reaction. Companies that treat workforce strategy as core infrastructure can absorb new contracts, new technology, and new expectations without drama. Those that don't are forced into a game of constant catch-up - hiring and onboarding under pressure, and hoping key people don't leave at the wrong moment.