Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story titled: Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs. The TL;DR is that the pool of blue-collar workers who are able and willing to perform tasks on a factory floor in the United States is shrinking. Boomers are retiring and young people don't want to work these jobs; immigrants are choosing to leave the US or go elsewhere. The factories that both political parties have promised to save and keep open might close anyway, because they simply can't find people to work the lines.
Factory work can be extremely complex and require a lot of training, and many replacement workers are simply not able to just jump right in. If factories are going to stay open, we need a way to upskill workers, ASAP. There is plenty of labor in the market, including formerly incarcerated folks, folks struggling with addiction, and people who might want to make a career change. But they all need to train quickly and at scale. Luckily, as I wrote in my snap post about the article, there is technology that can do exactly that.
AI and XR will make the upskilling revolution happen if companies are willing to make the investment. The audience these factories are trying to reach is composed of plenty of gamers who would be thrilled to spend time in a headset. AI can make the content creation much quicker -- there are several platforms coming to market that allow users to create a 3D scenario using prompts, as well as some off the shelf training to fill in gaps.
There are endless stats about how XR training works well -- it produces a 75% increase in learning quality and retention and 70% performance improvement. Additionally, it works well for factories because the work can be dangerous and the equipment can be expensive. If a trainee makes a mistake in real life, they could be injured or worse; in XR, they just restart the simulation and go again.
The real win would be training legacy and retiring workers to create this content themselves. It's not as hard as you think -- I've taught hundreds of non-technical people how to build this content, and once they know the steps, they're home free.
No matter what happens with tariffs, the factory worker shortage will have profound impacts on our economy. By investing in this type of training at scale, we can turn things around.