A key policy goal of President Donald Trump’s administration is bringing jobs back to American factories, though the effort has been mired in a years-long slog despite support from both Democratic and Republican administrations.
But even beyond the challenge of getting large, multinational companies to reroute their complex supply chains, there’s a large and unsolved skills gap problem to address even if these U.S. manufacturing jobs were to proliferate. Peter Koerte, the chief technology officer and chief strategy officer at German technology conglomerate Siemens AG, points to research that shows that the average tenure of a U.S. manufacturing worker has slipped from 20 years in 2019 to just 3 years in 2023.
