Lincoln Electric helps show millennials the new realities of manufacturing

June 08, 2016 SCOTT SUTTELL

Lincoln Electric “uses VR to let young people test their welding skills around the country at career fairs, Boy Scout jamborees, farmer conventions and robot-building competitions," The Wall Street Journal says.

Lincoln Electric Co.'s use of virtual reality technology is highlighted in this Wall Street Journal story about efforts by U.S. companies to rebrand manufacturing as “a high-tech industry full of opportunity.”

Manufacturers “are recruiting both to attract skilled labor to a growing number of positions and to replenish a workforce from which baby boomers are retiring at a rapid pace,” the newspaper reports. By 2025, The Journal says, there will be 2 million unfilled manufacturing jobs, according to a study by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte Consulting.

One obvious solution could be millennials, people born in the 1980s and 1990s. But The Journal says manufacturers “face an uphill battle wooing this group,” whose members overwhelmingly want to work in technology fields and don’t connect manufacturing with such work.

In one tactic to combat that misperception, companies including Lincoln Electric and General Electric are using VR and other technologies to highlight the tech virtues of modern manufacturing.