Once labeled “dirty, difficult and dangerous,” manufacturing jobs are now considered highly desirable in Korea. In fact, a recent poll asked Koreans what they would prefer to be: an automotive assembler with a high school degree earning a good salary or an office worker with a liberal arts degree earning less. Some 76 percent chose the automotive job. Similarly, when asked to choose between being an automotive assembler and a “grade nine” civil servant with a college degree, 85 percent chose the factory job.

Imagine that! If only young Americans felt the same way. At press time, there were 410,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. That figure has topped 400,000 every month since July 2020. Clearly, there’s a need for workers, and it’s only going to get worse with mass deportations looming and the last of the baby boom generation retiring.

Alas, we continue to steer students toward four-year university degree programs. That has me concerned not just for manufacturing, but the trades, as well.

Recently, I had a plumbing problem in my 100-year-old house. The plumbing company sent a young man in his 20s to fix it. After two visits, the problem remained. For the third visit, the company sent the “old timer.” He knew exactly what the issue was and fixed it straight away. Evidently, plumbing was different back in the 1920s. Having just turned 60 myself this year, I couldn’t help but think, “chalk one up for us old timers.”

Though I was delighted the problem got fixed, I was also a little sad that the young man was not with the old timer to learn a trick of the trade. As old timers like my plumber retire, a lot of institutional knowledge will invariably be lost. Often, the most valuable knowledge is not what you learn in books or class, but what you learn on the job in the school of hard knocks.

As manufacturers bring young people into their plants, they would be well-advised to capture the hard-won tribal knowledge of their elders.