THE CITY OF ROCKFORD, IL, is located 90 miles northwest of Chicago. It has a long, proud history of making machine tools and metal parts, such as nuts and bolts.

GIBSON COUNTY, IN —Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana has announced a $1 million commitment over the next four years to a new, regional workforce program in Gibson County.

The past few years have seen a significant imbalance between the number of available job openings in manufacturing in comparison to people available to fill them.

Organizations spend billions of dollars on tools to bolster employee engagement, but the return on those investments is unclear.

Some 12,838,000 million Americans held manufacturing jobs in April 2019. That's 12 percent more than in April 2010, it's the highest total since December 2008.

The fourth industrial revolution has begun and with it, comes changes to the way manufacturing work is done. New technology, such as collaborative robots, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and machine learning, aims to make manufacturing safer, more efficient and faster than ever before.

Manufacturing had a great year in 2018, and 2019 promises to be as good. However, clouds are on the horizon.

A little positive feedback at work can go a long way toward improving assemblers' long-term mental health and well-being. Engineers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the European Factory2Fit research consortium are studying the effects of work performance.

INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana has 85,000 unfilled jobs because employers can’t find skilled workers. To help solve that problem, the state spends some $1 billion annually on workforce development programs.