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www.wbjournal.com • Worcester Business Journal 79 CENTRAL MASS. 2025: MANUFACTURING M anufac tur ing in Central Massachusetts is getting both bigger and smaller at the same time. Contraction is most evident when examining the size of the workforce, which fell steeply between the early 1990s and the start of the Great Recession, and more gradually since then. And with producers not looking to place production jobs in a high-cost state like Massachusetts, headcounts should continue to decline slightly in the years ahead, said Jack Healy, director of operations at the Worcester-based Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MassMEP). "Manufacturing does not employ and probably will not employ large groups of people in the future," Healy said. "No way are we going back to the numbers we used to have." But thanks to technological advances, the sector is more productive than ever before. The real gross domestic product (GDP) for manufacturing in Worcester County jumped from $3.97 billion in 2001 to $5.57 billion in 2012, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data, with the sector expanding from just 14.4 percent of the county's economy in 2001 to 19 percent in 2012. And those gains have been particularly concentrated in recent years, with the BEA finding that Central Massachusetts' compounded real GDP growth rate for manufacturing leaped 6.11 percent between 2009 and 2012, but grew by only 1.94 percent across all industries. "What people think about manufac- turing is not necessarily true anymore," Healy said. "Things have changed, pri- marily for the better." Bringin' it back home The influx of activity could pick up in the coming years thanks to reshoring, or companies bringing work they had moved abroad back to the United States. Companies have become increasingly aware of the benefits offered by local production, said Brian Gilmore, execu- tive vice president of external relations for the Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM). Those include reduced shipping costs as well as avoid- ing weather-related issues or interna- tional disruptions. American producers can also com- pete better due to wage growth in Asia in recent years, Gilmore said. However, Massachusetts isn't that well-positioned to benefit from the phe- nomenon, Healy said. Defense work never really left the region, he said, while profit margins are too slim in mass-produced electronics — where the commonwealth lost most of its manu- facturing jobs — to allow for its return. "None of that electronics is really going to be reshored," Healy said. Any work returning to Massachusetts is likely to be capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. Healy pointed to Taiwan-based Foxconn opening a whol- ly automated plant in Pennsylvania as an example of what could happen in the Bay State. Even without a sizeable workforce, Healy said the region would benefit from the substantial investment and industry activity a new factory would provide. Gilmore expects any new manu- facturing work in the common- wealth to use specialized materi- als and entail a more complex process. "Because we're a high-cost state, the materials manufac- tured here generally have a higher value," he said. One seismic change in the works involves the adoption of 3-D printing, which creates fully-formed plastic objects of various designs. Healy said fix- tures and adapters can be made far more quickly using 3-D applica- tions, which presents a steep chal- lenge to general manufacturers. "3-D will be just as disruptive to this industry as the iPhone has been to the optics industry," Healy said. Turning to the colleges Central Massachusetts has been on the forefront, though, of addressing the shortage of high-skilled manufac- turing workers, a problem that will only be exacerbated over the next few years by the retirement of 100,000 baby boomers, said Gail Carberry, president of Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) in Worcester. Manufacturers in this region are already having to turn away business or pay massive amounts of overtime due to a lack of qualified workers, Carberry said. But QCC and others are working to close the skills gap. The school is slated to open an advanced manufactured center in Southbridge in early 2016 that will serve 600 high school and college students, an effort bolstered by a $2 million state grant awarded in May. And thanks in part to a National Science Foundation grant aimed at con- vincing parents and high school guid- ance counselors of the rosy job pros- pects in manufacturing, Carberry said student interest has grown. QCC has more than tripled enroll- ment in its manufacturing technology programs, from 243 students in 2006 to 757 students this year, while enrollment in the community college's engineering programs has soared from 70 students in 2007 to 300. The school has also worked to bridge its associate's degree programs in sci- ence, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields with voca- tional high schools, Fitchburg State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Those efforts have paid dividends, Carberry said, with 24 of WPI's recent engineering graduates having gotten their start at QCC. The students benefit- ted as well, she said, to the tune of saving $25,000 on their college educations. "We can't all be washing each other's suits," Carberry said. "Somebody needs to be making them." n BY MICHAEL NOVINSON Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer Bigger + leaner = more output