By Kyle Brown, Sarah Hallam and Jiayi Shi

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MEXICO, Mo. — Manufacturing businesses are struggling to find workers, and business owners want to educate more young people to fill their staffs.

 

Businesses in mid-Missouri need to meet the high demand for manufacturing jobs. But, they are faced with a small pool of qualified workers made worse by a low statewide unemployment rate, making it difficult to find and hire the right people for the job.

 

“The unemployment rate for Saline county is 3.4, which is virtually zero,” said Stan Moore, executive director for Marshall-Saline Economic Development Corporation. “And all of those companies, like the food production companies, the ag-related service companies, even the hospital, the school, they’re having trouble being fully staffed.”

 

When there is a low unemployment rate, not many people are looking for jobs. In turn, businesses are competing with one another to hire new employees. This causes productivity within a business to go stagnant, according to a study from Oxford Reveiw of Economic Policy.

 

Outside businesses considering moving to Marshall are also turned off by the low unemployment. Moore said when potential businesses request information about Marshall as a site, they give out information on how many employers they’ll need.

 

“The ones that need more than just a handful of workers just go somewhere else, so we don't really have a shot at those,” Moore said.

 

In order to keep up with the high demand for manufacturing jobs, businesses in Marshall don’t always have the option to hire the most qualified workers. Often, businesses seem to take whomever they can get.

 

“There's a company just down the street here. Since last November they've hired 60 to 70 people, and out of that 60 to 70 that got hired over the last three or four months, they've retained eight or nine,” Moore said. “Because they lack the skills to work in the factories and then in the industries. They're just not prepared for them.”

 

Mexico is another city in mid-Missouri where businesses are also struggling to find trained manufacturing employees. These businesses are trying to convince young people to pursue a technical education, rather than a bachelor’s degree. They don’t want to compete for a small pool of workers like Marshall.
 

“They are seeing a decline in high school students becoming interested in [the manufacturing] field, and so they're really concerned about their future workforce,” said Brandi Glover, executive director of workforce development at Moberly Area Community College.

 

The Columbia campus of Moberly Area Community College currently offers manufacturing and industrial classes as part of its mechatronics program. Administrators at MACC created this program after seeing a gap between the number of middle-skill jobs available and the number of people trained to work those jobs.

 

A middle-skill job is one that requires more education than a high school diploma, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree.

 

Middle-skill jobs account for 53 percent of Missouri’s jobs, but only 46 percent of workers are trained at the middle-skill level, leaving a gap of 7 percent.

 

“The mechatronics program has a lot of the essential coursework needed to really understand manufacturing facilities, to understand the production line, and what it takes to be able to not only work in production but also maintain and keep the machines running and operating smoothly,” Glover said.

 

Dawn Foods, a local manufacturer in Mexico, recently gave a grant of $17,439.30 to Moberly Area Community College. The grant will help the school buy technology to start building another mechatronics lab, modeled after the one operating at its Columbia campus.

 

By turning to community colleges and even promoting technical programs in high schools, Glover said Mexico businesses hope to not run into the same difficulties Marshall has with employment.  

 

"That was what prompted them to come to us to address this middle skills gap, but also even further on planning for the future of what's going to be available in Mexico and making sure their companies stay strong and rooted in Mexico.”

 

Many students in the mechatronics program at the Columbia campus work in the industrial field already and have enrolled in the program after seeing firsthand how successful they can be if they get this middle-skill training.

 

“There's a lot of opportunities out there in the field,” said Aldo Mendez, an advanced manufacturing student in the mechatronics program at Moberly Area Community College. “This is the main reason why I want to study — to be able to have more opportunities either doing manufacturing or technical jobs.”

 

These opportunities also come with higher wages. The average wage for a manufacturing job in Missouri is $56,285, which is almost $10,000 more than the average private sector wage. Along with the higher wage, Mendez said he wants to be more marketable to employers.

 

“I want to be a better employee and be able to offer more and educate myself,” Mendez said. “That's the main idea to be more successful.”