By: Catherine Mcconnell, Policy Advisor Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, US Department of Education
The U.S. Department of Education is excited to join manufacturers, workers, educators, students, and families across our nation in celebrating National Manufacturing Day. Manufacturing is essential to our country’s vitality: it sparks creativity, fuels global competitiveness, brings dreams and ideas to life, and helps spread and scale innovation. Advanced manufacturing—which leverages leading-edge technology in clean and modern environments, —is a rapidly growing and in-demand industry across the country. With tremendous opportunities to create our future and the significant impact manufacturing has on our economy, we need more young people and adults to envision their future in manufacturing. Over the last two years, the U.S. economy has added 830,000 manufacturing jobs, with estimates that we will have more than two million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.