The Missing Hands

Drive past the right stretch of desert outside Phoenix, or farmland outside Columbus, and you will see the most expensive bet in American industrial history taking physical shape. Steel frames the size of small towns. Cranes by the dozen. These are the new fabs, the new battery plants, the new factories that a decade of policy and a pandemic's worth of hard lessons decided the country could no longer live without.

The concrete is the easy part. In the first issue of Lead Time we followed the semiconductor supply chain to its conclusion and found that rebuilding it is, at bottom, a teaching problem. This issue widens the lens past chips to the whole reshoring boom, and finds the same wall. America is putting up factories faster than it is putting up the workforce to run them. That gap, between the buildings and the people, is the single most important operations story of this decade, and it is the reason a company like ours exists.

The building boom is real

Start with the scale, because it is genuinely staggering and easy to underestimate.

According to the Reshoring Initiative, which tracks these announcements, US companies and foreign investors announced about 365,000 reshoring and foreign-direct-investment jobs in 2022, an all-time record and a 53 percent jump over the year before. The pace cooled but stayed historically high: roughly 287,000 announced in 2023 and about 245,000 in 2024. Cumulatively since 2010, more than two million such jobs have been announced, of which an estimated 1.7 million have actually been filled.

That word, announced, matters, and we will keep using it honestly. A press release is not a paycheck, and hiring tends to lag an announcement by a year or two. But the money behind these announcements is very real and already in the ground. Real spending on manufacturing construction has roughly doubled since the end of 2021, and spending specifically on computer and electronics factories has quadrupled. By the middle of 2024 the country was pouring more than 11 billion dollars a month into building these plants.

The cause is no mystery. The CHIPS and Science Act put 52.7 billion dollars and a 25 percent tax credit behind chip plants. The Inflation Reduction Act put hundreds of billions behind clean-energy manufacturing. Companies that spent thirty years chasing the lowest-cost country looked at a stuck container ship and a single contested island and decided that resilience was worth paying for. The Reshoring Initiative estimates that incentives like CHIPS and the IRA drove about two thirds of 2024's announced jobs.

So the demand is set. Now comes the hard part.

The hands are not there

You cannot run a factory with a building. You run it with planners, schedulers, buyers, maintenance technicians, logistics coordinators, and the operations people who keep materials moving through a line that never stops. And there are nowhere near enough of them.

The clearest measure comes from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, who study this every few years. Their 2024 analysis projects that US manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million new workers between 2024 and 2033, and that if nothing changes, roughly 1.9 million of those jobs, about half of the skilled openings, could go unfilled. An earlier version of the same study estimated that a gap on that scale could cost the US economy as much as a trillion dollars in a single year.

This is not a forecast that practitioners need convincing of. In the 2025 MHI Annual Industry Report, supply chain leaders named workforce their number one internal challenge: 52 percent struggle to hire and retain workers, and 45 percent point to a general talent shortage, ahead of forecasting and even ahead of shifting customer demand. A big part of the pressure is simple demographics. Roughly a third of the supply chain and logistics workforce is at or past retirement age, and the people walking out the door are taking decades of hard-won judgment with them.

The official labor statistics tell the same story from the demand side. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of logisticians will grow 17 percent from 2024 to 2034, more than four times the average for all occupations, with about 26,400 openings every year and median pay around 80,900 dollars. Industrial engineers, the people who design how the work flows, are projected to grow 11 percent, with the BLS explicitly citing demand to manage supply chains and logistics. These are not niche roles. They are the connective tissue of every factory rising out of that desert.

The constraint on American reshoring is not capital and not concrete. It is the supply of people who know how to make a complex operation run.

The gap is structural, not a bad year

It would be comforting to call this a temporary mismatch that a slow economy will fix. It is not, for two reasons.

The first is that the demand is policy-driven and durable. CHIPS, the IRA, and the broader push to de-risk supply chains are multi-year commitments with factories already half-built. This is not a hiring spike that disappears in the next downturn.

The second reason is deeper, and it is the part operators feel most: the work itself is changing faster than the workforce. In DHL's widely cited talent study, the single most common driver of the shortage was not a lack of bodies but changing job requirements. The skills an operations role demanded ten years ago are not the skills it demands now.

Automation and AI are the accelerant. In the 2024 MHI report, 29 percent of supply chain leaders said they already use robotics and automation and another 54 percent planned to within five years. Gartner's late-2025 survey of supply chain leaders found that 55 percent expect agentic AI to reduce the need to hire for entry-level positions, while 86 percent said it will force them to build entirely new ways of developing talent. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39 percent of a worker's core skills will change by 2030, and that nearly six in ten workers will need meaningful reskilling.

Read those numbers together and the shape of the problem becomes clear. It is not only that there are too few people. It is that the work is moving from execution to judgment, from doing the task to managing the systems and exceptions around it, and the training pipeline has not caught up. A warehouse still needs people, but it increasingly needs people who can supervise an automated system, read the data it produces, and act when it breaks. That is a different person, and someone has to teach them.

The fastest way to close it

Here is the part that should interest anyone who works in education, runs an operation, or is deciding what to do with their own career.

When the experts who measured this gap turned to solutions, they did not reach for anything exotic. Deloitte, the Manufacturing Institute, and the semiconductor industry's own workforce report all land in the same place: training programs, apprenticeships, community and technical colleges, and industry certifications, located close to where the work is. The bottleneck is education, which means education is also the throttle.

Certifications matter here out of proportion to their cost, because they do something the labor market badly needs in a hurry: they make skill legible. A degree says you studied; a current, recognized certification says you can do this specific job today. The pay data backs it up. In the 2025 ASCM Supply Chain Salary and Career Report, a survey of more than 3,500 professionals, those holding an APICS certification reported a median salary of 103,000 dollars against 86,000 for those without, roughly 20 percent higher. Certified professionals also moved fast in a hot market: nearly seven in ten who changed jobs landed a new role within six months.

The major supply chain certifications map almost cleanly onto the kinds of roles the reshoring boom is short of:

• CPIM covers the inside of the plant: production planning, scheduling, inventory, and materials. It is the credential for the people who keep a factory's internal operations from seizing up.
• CSCP covers the end-to-end chain, supplier through customer, which is exactly the systems-level view that automation is making more valuable, not less.

We will give each of these its own honest assessment in the next issue, including who should sit which exam and where the certifications stop being worth the money. The headline for today is simpler. The factories are coming whether or not the workforce is ready. Whether they run well, and where the people who run them come from, is a question that gets answered one trained person at a time.

That is the work we do at SCM Education Solutions, and it is why we built our study app the way we did: certification prep that costs a manageable amount each month instead of hundreds up front, so the credential is within reach of the people the buildout actually needs.

If you are studying for one of these exams, or thinking about it, the study app is built for exactly this moment. And if you run a program or a team and want to talk about getting people credentialed at scale, reply to this email. We read every one.

Sources

• Reshoring Initiative, 2024 Annual Report plus Q1 2025, June 2025 (jobs announced by year, the cumulative two-million figure, the incentive-driven share of 2024 announcements).
• Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, Taking Charge: Manufacturers Support Growth with Active Workforce Strategies, April 2024 (3.8 million workers needed, up to 1.9 million unfilled); and Creating Pathways for Tomorrow's Workforce Today, May 2021 (the up-to-one-trillion-dollar estimate).
• MHI and Deloitte, 2025 MHI Annual Industry Report, and the 2024 edition (workforce as the top internal challenge; robotics and automation adoption).
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Logisticians, 2024 to 2034 projections (17 percent growth, openings, median pay) and Industrial Engineers.
• US Treasury and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, analyses of US manufacturing construction spending, 2023 and 2024 (the doubling and quadrupling of factory construction).
• DHL Supply Chain, The Supply Chain Talent Shortage: From Gap to Crisis, 2017 (changing job requirements as the top driver; the aging workforce; the often-cited demand-to-supply ratio).
• Gartner, Future of Supply Chain 2026 survey, February 2026 (agentic AI and entry-level hiring; new talent-development needs).
• World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, January 2025 (share of core skills changing by 2030; reskilling need).
• ASCM, 2025 Supply Chain Salary and Career Report, May 2025 (the certification salary premium and placement speed); and ASCM certification scopes for CPIM and CSCP.