Accelerating the Domestic Industrial Base: ATDM Director Holley on Workforce Development for Advanced Manufacturing

At this point, it’s a familiar story: the US faces a critical lack of manufacturing workers in the next decade. Estimates are that, by 2032, the nation’s manufacturing labor pool could be short by almost 2 million individuals.

What remain much less familiar are all the many initiatives that have sprung up to address this very problem. For instance, in 2020, the DoD’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) Program Office announced the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing (ATDM) program in Danville, Virginia.

With a curriculum designed by the US Navy, specifically targeted to the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and especially the Submarine Industrial Base (SIB), ATDM trains students in 16-week courses across five tracks. In addition to additive manufacturing (AM), students can learn CNC machining, welding, non-destructive testing (NDT), and quality control.

The director of the program, Dr. Debra Holley, came to ATDM with an extensive administrative  background in the community college world, an area of education poised to be increasingly crucial to developing new manufacturing workers in the US. Dr. Holley explained to me how ATDM has been ramping up its activity to meet the urgent needs of the industries it’s preparing its students to enter:

“The first year we had 84 students, the next year 168, and then over 300 in 2023. Our goal is 576 this year and next year we’re aiming for over 600, so that we can hopefully reach 1,000 by 2026,” Dr. Holley said. “Our first cohort came through in June 2021, and we now have two cohorts, our 12th and 13th, going through their 16-week, 600-hour training courses. The students are here in three different shifts throughout the day, which is part of the design of the curriculum to simulate the real-world workforce environment they’re going to be a part of.

Other parts of that are simple things like badges, punching a time clock, a strict attendance policy — all the soft skills involved in adhering to a routine and showing up consistently, and on time. While it is a civilian program, about 25 percent of students are veterans, and you do notice a bit of a difference in terms of there being less of a learning curve with those students, when it comes to the basics like showing up on time. In general, though, I think most students view their education here as a way that they can serve their country without having to enlist, or re-enlist.”

The reason the Navy is the primary driver behind ATDM and other similar initiatives is rather straightforward: the US is planning to return to a rate of submarine production that the nation hasn’t seen since the 1980s, a time when the proportion of manufacturers in the US workforce was far higher than it is today. Meanwhile, all the nation’s other strategic sectors — automotive, aerospace, semiconductors — will be seeking their own influxes of manufacturing workers from an increasingly scarce labor pool, one that will continue to dry up as more and more baby boomers retire.

Nonetheless, there’s a steadily growing awareness surrounding these issues, in no small part thanks to the PR push that agencies like the Navy have embarked on. Dr. Holley sees first-hand this trend that has recently started to receive attention in the mainstream press — Gen Z is starting to get excited about manufacturing:

“I think that the commercials that the Navy initiative Build Submarines has been doing — and things like the Build Subs race car — are having an impact,” Dr. Holley noted. “There’s also a new skepticism about the idea that a four-year university is the only path, or even the best path, to a solid career. Already, many of our students may be making more than what graduates with four-year degrees will be making right out of college, and I think that message is starting to catch on. More so than in the past, students who are just out of high school are now really asking themselves, ‘What do I want to do?’

For the most part, the students come in here not knowing much about what they’re about to learn. So when they start to gain that familiarity from hands-on experience, they get excited about it. My office is near the CNC lab, and it happens quite frequently that a student in the CNC track will come by my office and say ‘Look, I did it!’”

Dr. Holley pointed out another thing that gets students excited about manufacturing, which is the opportunity to enter a career path with tangible room for growth:

“The lowest paying jobs we see, to start, are for welding, which starts at about 18 an hour,” explained Dr. Holley. “So at first, that might not sound like too big of a difference from retail jobs, for instance. But with manufacturing, there’s room for advancement. Most of the companies we’ve worked with have pathways along the lines of, for someone who starts at 18 an hour, within six months, they can work their way up to 20, and so on. One student who was in quality control inspection, though, was making 35 an hour from the start. But even for the positions that start out with lower wages, the standard in the industry is quite a contrast to retail, where, for the most part, there’s not much of a pathway beyond entry-level.”

Rear Admiral Scott Pappano, US Navy PEO Strategic Submarines, meets and greets ATDM students in Danville, VA

As I mentioned, in addition to unique initiatives like ATDM, community colleges are among the institutions leading the way in creating new blue-collar pathways for America’s next generations of workers. Many aspects of ATDM are reminiscent of the community college model, but there are key differences, as well, and those aren’t solely related to the intensiveness of the compressed timeline.

With her background, Dr. Holley is in the perfect position to observe the advantages of the ATDM model:

“I love the community college model — I worked in that system for 30 years — but one thing that community colleges have difficulties in keeping up with is simply the rate of technological progress,” Dr. Holley said. “Along those lines, it can be difficult for community colleges to make sure that students’ skills are transferable once they enter the workforce.

There’s multiple reasons for that, including the time it to takes to redesign a curriculum, as well as the fact that, unlike with ATDM, the instructors aren’t out in the industry learning what new processes and standards are out there, as soon as they arise. So in terms of vocational training, specifically, community colleges oftentimes are just scratching the surface in terms of what prospective employers really want from new hires. That’s one of the things ATDM has really been able to address: we can shift more rapidly, meaning if, all of a sudden, there’s a new technology out there in the defense industry for something that goes on a sub, we can adapt the curriculum for the next cohort that comes in.”

With all this in mind, it’s not surprising that the US Navy would implement a new program like the recently-announced Michigan Maritime Manufacturing (M3) Initiative, a program that ATDM helped advise on.

While it might not make sense to implement the precise curriculum used at ATDM in every state in the US, I personally love the idea of an accelerated, targeted training program for the key industries in every region. That aspect of ATDM — a deployable, intensive training course for a specific industry — can certainly be universalized. And, I would argue, it should be: the US industrial base will need all the help it can get.

Images courtesy of ATDM