In the United States, and in general in the main Western economies, the manufacturing industry faces a serious problem: there is no specialized labor to fill the vacancies that are leaving who retire.
Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, has stressed in an interview for the podcast Office Hours: Business Edition that his company has “5,000 mechanic vacancies. A workshop with an elevator and tools, and no one to work in it. They charge 120,000 a year, but it takes five years to learn how to do it.” This lack of training is the weakest link in the chain for Ford and the majority of the industrial sector.
Global talent crisis. One of Trump’s slogans when he came to power is to reindustrialize the country. However, for many billion dollar investment that I get for build huge factorieswill fall on deaf ears if there are no well-trained employees to produce. This problem can be extrapolated to any country in the world.
During his podcast appearance, Farley lamented: “We have over a million vacancies in critical jobs: emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and technical trades. It’s very serious.”
The situation is not exclusive to Ford. According what was published by NPRwith data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the US there were almost 500,000 unfilled jobs in the manufacturing sector, even with a rising unemployment rate that stood at 4.3%. This is an indication that, although there are people who are unemployed, companies cannot hire them because they simply do not have the training to do the jobs they need.
In Spain, the problem is also significant. The BBVA Foundation estimated that the manufacturing industry had lost a quarter of its employment since the beginning of the century, and there are an estimated 100,000 vacant jobs in the industry, in a country with 2,613,200 unemployed, according to data of the EPA’s third quarter of 2025. Again, this mismatch is due to the gap between the training of the workforce and the needs of companies.
Importance of Vocational Training. Farley insists that the current reality demands a serious commitment to professional training, since “to learn how to disassemble a diesel engine from a Ford Super Duty truck requires at least five years.” For this reason, the CEO points out that without a determined effort to strengthen technical training schools and offer competitive wages, the American industrial economy—and that of any country that aspires to industrialization—is doomed to failure.
The lack of investment in this type of training is one of the main causes of the crisis. Farley mentioned that “we don’t have trade schools. We are not investing in educating a new generation like my grandfather, who started with nothing and built a middle-class life for his family (working on the assembly line of a Ford factory).”
The Spanish FP is a success story. In Spain, Vocational Training has experienced a big change thanks to investment policies, greater training offers and the involvement of companies in the training of those who will later become their employees. In fact, according to the report ‘Infoempleo Adecco 2024‘, in 46.96% of the job offers published during the last year, candidates were asked have a vocational training degree.
The FP student report of the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports reveals that, in the 2022-2023 academic year, 1,085,259 students were enrolled in Vocational Training degrees. That represents an increase of 32.6% compared to the last five years.
The demographic factor is going to make it worse. A key factor in the number of vacancies is the template aging: Many workers with decades of experience are retiring and there are not enough young people trained to take their places. This is a problem that not only affects the industrial sector, but also affects the entire labor market, both in the public sector as private.
Seeing that young people are showing greater interest in Vocational Training invites us to think that the number of vacancies in sectors with vacancies due to lack of trained labor at present will not increase, but the big question is whether this generational change will arrive on time and to the areas that are needed. As and as highlighted Jensen Huang, the new millionaires will not be engineers or AI experts, but electricians, carpenters, bricklayers or bus drivers.
Incentives: “Pay them more”. Never have three words held as much truth as those spoken by Joe Biden when someone asked him how to end the labor shortage: “Pay them more.” Pay them more.
In his attempts to attract qualified labor to his assembly lines, Ford’s CEO adopted a strategy that the company’s founder, Henry Ford, implemented in 1914: raise salaries. That’s why Farley boasted of paying $120,000 to his mechanics. Just as he told in an interview with Walter Isaacson, Farley came to that conclusion when during labor agreement negotiations, some of his workers approached him and commented: “Young people don’t want to work here. Jim, you pay $17 an hour and they’re very stressed.”
To combat this, Ford approved a 25% pay increase for its workers over four years, ensuring everyone has a fair wage and a viable career future. have a professional opportunity with a good salary and job stability is the best incentive for young people to spend five years of their lives training for a profession.
Image | ford
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