Manufacturing and Digital Skills

First-of-its-kind center from a South Carolina community college aims to prepare the next-generation technical workforce. Also, medical billing could be the canary in the coal mine for AI replacing workers, and a Colorado college with a focus on stackable, job-relevant certificates.

Anticipating the Assembly Lines of Tomorrow

Manufacturing jobs don’t look much like they did during the nation’s industrial heyday, with today’s high-tech assembly lines. And the pace of change could pick up again as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are poised for bigger roles on the shop floor.

South Carolina’s Greenville Technical College wants to get ahead of the curve with a new center that aims to bridge manufacturing and AI. It’s a big bet on a manufacturing future that has yet to arrive, Colleen Connolly reports for Work Shift. And the facility is likely the first of its kind from a community college.

“We still want to prepare students in the old traditional way, but also incorporate those different skill sets and data analytics into the whole process,” Kelvin Byrd, dean of Greenville Tech’s School of Advanced Manufacturing and Transportation Technology, told Connolly.

Manufacturing is big in Greenville. The industry’s footprint in the county alone includes more than 1K companies and 30K employees. Those jobs pay well, too, with an average annual wage of roughly $78K. 

The county’s numbers don’t even include the region’s biggest manufacturer, BMW, which in 1992 began developing a huge plant on 900 acres of peach orchards about 15 miles up I-85 from Greenville Tech’s main campus. The facility now employs 11K workers, who produce more than 1,500 vehicles per day. BMW also recently began building a $700M EV battery plant in nearby Woodruff, which the company says will create at least 300 jobs.

To help meet the demand for workers at BMW and other companies with local facilities, including Michelin and Lockheed Martin, Greenville Tech a decade ago opened a high-tech manufacturing campus.

The college is looking to replicate that investment for a world of manufacturing driven by AI, Connolly reports. It is seeking $30M in state funding to finish work on the new center focused on industrial cybersecurity and AI.

Students typically pursue credentials in IT and cyber through college departments that are separate from manufacturing programs. But Greenville Tech is anticipating more crossover for job roles in industrial cybersecurity.

An Evolutionary Shift: It remains unclear how digital skills will factor into frontline manufacturing jobs, says Gardner Carrick, chief program officer at the Manufacturing Institute from the National Association of Manufacturers. But he says Greenville Tech has identified a likely trend.

“They’re recognizing that it’s coming,” Carrick says, noting that demand for digital skills has risen during the past decade along with automation. Workers don’t do coding for machines on the factory floor, he says, but they need to know how to use digital components of those machines. “It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.”

A solid grasp of the current and anticipated needs of local employers is the key for ensuring that Greenville Tech’s gamble pays off for students.

“Community colleges shouldn’t take those risks without knowing that they have big customers telling them that this is the way things are going,” says Carrick.

Greenville Tech has the advantage of close ties with heavyweight manufacturers that drive the local job market. But a similar approach can work with the industry’s much more common small employers, who may hire a couple entry-level workers per year. The Manufacturing Institute encourages a “team sport model” where manufacturers work together to build close ties with the local community college.

“You need to aggregate the demand across companies,” says Carrick.

Ideally, these are operational partnerships, he says, with a focus on experiential learning. Through internships and apprenticeships, community college students get a firsthand view of what skills are needed on the assembly line, and they can bring that intel back to campus.

That sort of “real-time engagement” through experiential learning “gives you weekly feedback,” Carrick says.

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Artificial Intelligence as Medical Coder

Like many researchers, Melanie Zaber and Tobias Sytsma of RAND Corporation are trying to understand how generative AI will impact jobs. To start, they’re focusing heavily on jobs in healthcare.

“Medical coding, we think, is going to be the canary in the coal mine,” Zaber says. “The returns are pretty high in that field because you already have worker shortages and relatively highly paid individuals.”

That’s speculation that we’ve heard before in our reporting. The difference, though: Zaber and Sytsma have been talking with a large hospital that is already using AI for all its outpatient billing, with human workers only being used to audit the AI.

It’s one of just a few examples of AI already doing an entire job role. Zaber and Sytsma are gearing up for research on how widespread the practice is, but there’s no reason to believe it will stay isolated to that one organization for long. The hospital—a research one with a strong community-care focus—is often a testing ground for innovations, Zaber says. And it uses medical record software from Epic, which is among the most widely used by healthcare systems. 

But even if the practice were to quickly disseminate, hiring might not slow because there is such an acute shortage of medical coders. The tasks that people work on, though—like auditing the work of AI tools—would likely become more complex and require greater sophistication. The same is true for fields like radiology that are also primed for wider use of AI, Zaber and Sytsma say.

The upshot is that workers likely will need higher levels of experience and training, and there’s an open question about how that will happen. But if healthcare systems manage it right, AI could improve access and affordability in U.S. healthcare without much job loss.

“If we’re going to get a good news story, it’s probably going to be in health,” Zaber says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Stackable and Job Relevant

While stackability is a hot concept in higher education, it remains far from the norm. Relatively few colleges make it easy for students to seamlessly stack certificates and other short-term credentials toward degrees without losing time or money in the process.

Colorado Mountain College, however, is built on stackability. With a heavy dose of certificate programs, the dual-mission college offers seven academic pathways that allow students to combine degrees with certificates, minors, and specialties. It also provides an intriguing model for a college focused solely on the local job market.

The college isn’t preparing students for careers in other regions, even Denver, says Matt Gianneschi, Colorado Mountain College’s long-serving COO, who became its president last year. The goal instead is helping students break into jobs that make the community work, like first responders, dental hygienists, and firefighters.

“Get out of the national market,” says Gianneschi, who previously served in education policy roles for three Colorado governors. “Focus on your students. Focus on your market.”

The college has 11 campuses, all connected to ski resorts in small, rural areas. About 35% of its 14K students are Latino, with 2K students who speak English as their second language. 

To ensure that Colorado Mountain College’s academic tracks are relevant to local hiring demands and that they lead to good jobs, every new program it has launched over the last seven years had to be in fields that clear MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.

Likewise, the college is dependent on local property taxes rather than state funding, which allows it to be focused on job-connected programs rather enrollment. And if a degree program takes too much time to complete for working learners, the college breaks it into certificates that students can count toward an eventual degree.

The Kicker: “What jobs lead to sustainable-wage careers?” says Gianneschi. “How do we make it possible to live in our community?”

Open Tabs

Clean Energy
The Inflation Reduction Act’s $1T in climate and energy provisions is vulnerable as Republicans assume control in Washington, researchers write for the Brookings Institution. Yet a full repeal may be tricky, as the IRA’s incentives have benefited Republican constituents. The funding could lead to the creation of a projected 850K jobs annually. And clean energy jobs spiked by 14% since the IRA’s enactment in 2022, hitting nearly 270K jobs in Texas alone.

Skills-Based Hiring
President Biden in late December signed a bill to prioritize skills over degrees in federal hiring. The law requires the Office of Personnel Management to develop and implement a plan for transitioning to the use of technical assessments in hiring. It was backed by SHRM and several labor unions and builds on a series of actions to reduce degree requirements by both the Biden administration and the previous Trump administration.

Commerce Funding
Congress last month reauthorized the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, which provides grants aimed at innovation and economic competitiveness, including through job creation and workforce development. The legislative update was the first in two decades for EDA, which over the past three years directed roughly $6B in investments across 3,400 grants that either created or saved 555K jobs.

Office Work
The post-pandemic U.S. labor market has been volatile, in part due to stalled growth of lower-pay service jobs, finds a paper on technological disruption from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Roughly 500K fewer secretaries and administrative assistants are in the labor market compared to a decade ago, while retail sales jobs declined by 25%. Meanwhile, management and business and financial operations jobs have grown very rapidly.

AI and CS Degrees
Some computer science majors fear OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model may edge them out of the job market, reports Ina Fried for Axios AI+. The tool’s ability to independently tackle larger-scale projects could be a problem for CS grads and other workers, many worry. However, aspiring computer scientists shouldn’t fret too much, said Pascal Van Hentenryck, director of Georgia Tech’s AI Hub: “There are so many new things that need to be built.”

Thanks for reading, and happy 2025. To support our work, donate here. Catch you next week. —PF