The industrial skills shortage in America is the binding constraint on every re-industrialization plan currently being announced, funded, or celebrated — and it receives a fraction of the policy attention it deserves.
You can permit a mine, finance a smelter, and pass legislation mandating domestic production. None of it matters if you can’t find people who know how to run the equipment. The metallurgist who understands how to optimize a zinc smelting operation. The process engineer who can troubleshoot a sulfuric acid recovery system. The maintenance technician who knows why a specific valve is failing at 2 AM and how to fix it without shutting down the line. These skills are not taught in business schools. They are developed over years of hands-on industrial experience — and that experience base has been allowed to atrophy for a generation.
Craig Tindale was direct in his Financial Sense interview: the Colorado School of Mines needs to double in size. Every industrial training program in the country is undersized relative to what the re-industrialization ambition requires. We have approximately 22 industrial lobbyists at Congress and the Federal Reserve, compared to roughly 1,000 from the financial sector. That ratio reflects how little political energy has gone into building industrial workforce capacity compared to financial sector capacity.
The wage signal is already transmitting. Electricians, pipefitters, industrial mechanics, and process operators are commanding salaries that would have been implausible a decade ago. The market is signaling scarcity. The supply response — more people entering the trades, more industrial training programs, more investment in technical education — is visible but slow. Skills pipelines take years. The shortage will persist for at least a decade regardless of what policy actions are taken now.
For investors: the companies that have retained skilled industrial workforces through the deindustrialization era, and the education and training providers building the next generation of industrial workers, are both positioned at the beginning of a decade-long structural demand for a scarce resource.
The Hedge 