Ford CEO Jim Farley says America’s skilled-trades shortfall has become too large—and too varied by region and occupation—for any employer or state to solve on its own.
“Skilled trades are the backbone of our country and American manufacturing, and the backbone of the American dream,” Farley told media in remarks accompanying a new report from the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, adding that it’s personal for him, as his grandfather was a mechanic and his father grew up around cars. “No one company is going to solve this alone. It’s way too big of a problem,” he insisted.
The report is the first major public product of the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, the corporate coalition launched this summer by Ford, BlackRock, Google, and Carhartt, the formation of which was first reported by Fortune. The day before, Farley and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced Michigan LIFT (Launchpad for Industrial Innovation & Transformation), a $2 billion public-private initiative in which Ford aspires to award up to $1 billion in contracts to participating suppliers over the next decade, while the investment bank aspires to provide up to $1 billion in financing to suppliers.
Farley said there’s a lot of data on what he calls “the essential economy,” but it’s “scattered — and hard to compare. The Alliance is therefore launching the America’s Skilled Trades Dashboard, he said, a first-of-its-kind tool that brings it together in one place.
Dimon credited the city of Detroit with showing over the past decade “what is possible when business, government and community leaders work together for the long term,” adding that Michigan LIFT will work to connect customer demand, capital and public resources “so more companies can grow, more workers can participate and more critical capabilities can scale here in the United States.”
The new State of America’s Skilled Trades report finds that employers will need to fill about 1.7 million skilled-trades openings each year through 2035. More than 18 million people now work in the trades, contributing an estimated $3.8 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product in 2025., the report said, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis.
But there is not just one uniform national shortage, the Alliance found. Rather, data centers, manufacturing plants, grid projects, housing construction, and infrastructure investment are creating distinct labor pressures across different places—while retirement, worker migration, training capacity, and poor completion rates create different constraints in each one.
Nearly one-quarter of skilled-trades workers are 55 or older, compared with 11% who are younger than 25. Across the formal training pathways the report can measure, it estimates the country is preparing roughly 55 workers for every 100 needed nationally. The authors caution that the figure does not count all employer-led and on-the-job routes into the workforce.
The report finds that the labor challenge can look radically different depending on the trade. Industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights rank at the 98th percentile nationally for shortage pressure among 523 occupations measured, while electricians rank at the 85th percentile and automotive technicians rank at the 54th percentile.
Geography further complicates matters. Texas and North Carolina each gain about 5,000 trades workers annually on net through interstate migration, while New York loses about 9,000 more than it gains. The largest interstate flow is from California to Texas, at about 5,000 workers annually. Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, which led the report’s quantitative analysis, described the fast-growing states as “essentially importing the workers that they’re failing to train.”
The report also argues the challenge is not simply getting more people into apprenticeships and technical programs. Of every 100 people who start a skilled-trades apprenticeship, a Burning Glass Institute analysis found, only 48 complete it, and 29 enter a trade occupation within five years of leaving. In related postsecondary programs, 48 out of 100 complete, while 34 ultimately work in a skilled trade. The two pathways draw from different data sources and are not directly comparable, the report says.
That creates a problem beyond recruitment, particularly as companies and states attempt to meet demand from major capital projects. Experienced workers are needed not only to fill jobs, but to mentor apprentices, supervise jobsite learning and teach the next generation. If those workers retire or get pulled into immediate project work, the training system itself can lose capacity.
The report calls for employers, labor groups, educators, local and state governments, workforce organizations, and funders to coordinate their responses. Its recommendations include improving completion and placement outcomes; providing child care, transportation and other supports for trainees; strengthening links from high-school career programs to apprenticeships and jobs; and planning workforce needs when large projects are announced—not after hiring becomes urgent.
Farley framed that as an argument against siloed approaches.
“It takes people breaking out of their silos,” he said. “It takes large and small and medium-sized employers, educators, policymakers, local leaders, and politicians all actually working together.”
“Ford is America’s automaker,” Farley said while announcing Michigan LIFT, “and we believe American manufacturing’s best days are ahead.”
Written by Nick Lichtenberg for Fortune as “Ford CEO Jim Farley teams with Jamie Dimon on $2 billion initiative as he fears the ‘backbone of the American dream’ is crumbling” and republished legally through syndication agreement with Reuters Connect.
