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In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to encourage the expansion of apprenticeships, setting a goal of 1 million new active apprentices. The order demonstrates that policymakers now understand what manufacturing employers have long felt: If we want to bring more manufacturing back to the United States, we need ways to build talent pipelines.
Workers are the backbone of our industry, and right now, we need more of them. More than two-thirds of employers in electronics manufacturing reported difficulty in finding and retaining skilled workers in an industry survey by the Global Electronics Association. By 2031, the U.S. manufacturing sector is projected to have 2.1 million unfilled jobs.
For employers, the benefits of apprenticeships are well-documented. In the United States, employers report an average return of $1.44 for every dollar invested in apprenticeship. Apprenticeship helps employers with hard-to-fill roles, as well as increases the productivity of workers. But even though apprenticeships are an age-old idea (dating back to Ben Franklin and Paul Revere) with plenty of data to back them up, they remain underused.
The good news is that interest in apprenticeships is growing: The number of active registered apprentices in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the past decade. While apprenticeship has the deepest roots in the skilled trades, it’s also expanding to new industries like firefighting, teaching, and healthcare. Can the approach work in fields like electronics manufacturing as well?
At Mack Technologies, we piloted our first apprenticeship in 2024, with four apprentices graduating from the Surface Mount/Circuit Board Technician apprenticeship program in Melbourne, south of Port Canaveral on Florida’s east coast. After the success of the initial group, we’ve now expanded the effort, rolling out new apprenticeship programs in partnership with the Global Electronics Association. What we’ve learned can help others across the manufacturing industry build and implement apprenticeships to solve their workforce challenges—in ways that help fulfill the president’s vision for a stronger American apprenticeship system.
Continue reading this article in the Fall 2025 issue of Community Magazine.
