Attracting, retaining and motivating a skilled workforce is the biggest challenge businesses face today.
Read more on how to use smart automation to fill the gap and attract Millennials to supply chain.
The mass exit of Baby Boomers from the workforce—including their long‐held jobs in manufacturing and warehousing—has been well documented in both business and mainstream media. Both Pew Research
and The Washington Post estimate that 10,000 Americans born between 1946 and 1964 retire every day. Yet, at the same time, the number of supply chain and manufacturing jobs is steadily increasing, even as overall U.S. job growth has slowed.
Enter the Millennials, which Pew recently defined as those persons born between 1980 and 19964 . By 2019, bolstered by an influx of immigrants, they’ll be 73 million strong and will overtake Baby Boomers in population as the more mature generation shrinks to 72 million.5 (They already surpassed Generation X—persons born between 1965 and 1980—as the largest portion of the workforce back in 2015.
Clearly there are loads of Millennials around—40% of them with bachelor’s degrees (and around 15% of them saddled with student loan debt and still living with mom and dad)—so surely manufacturers and distribution center operators won’t have any problem finding skilled workers to replace those retiring Baby Boomers, right?
Wrong.