Making it, better: it's not your father's factory floor. Advanced manufacturing seeks workers with new skills.

• Author: Hromadka, Erik
• Position: Cover story

INDIANA HAS TRADITIONally been a manufacturing state with an economy that relied heavily on auto and steel production. Such jobs used to provide long-term security with good wages and generally attracted those who left high school for work instead of college.

Today, Indiana still relies on manufacturing for approximately 20 percent of the state's jobs. However, those positions are increasingly being filled by skilled workers with specialized training in advanced manufacturing.

Lisa Laughner, vice president of the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative at the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, says educating people about the nature of manufacturing is an important part of the state's effort to prepare its economy for the future. She notes that many people have an outdated image of manufacturing jobs as low-skilled positions that involve repetitive tasks in a dirty environment.

That's no longer the case, she says. Today's advanced manufacturing is driven by worldwide competition to turn raw materials into finished products as effectively and efficiently as possible. To succeed in that environment, companies have used technology to increase output per employee by some 30 percent over the past 10 years.

Laughner says part of the public's misconception about advanced manufacturing results from limited access to high-tech manufacturing facilities. For example, she cites a Delphi facility in Kokomo that includes a 50,000-square-foot clean room for work on semiconductors that is nothing like an old-fashioned automotive assembly line.

"Things are changing dramatically in terms of what you are doing on the factory floor," Laughner says, noting that new advanced manufacturing employees are often working on computerized machines and expected to know how to program and maintain them. While such retooling has resulted in many painful job losses, it has also created demand for a new set of skills.

Jobs in such facilities are increasingly filled by those with higher levels of training. For example, Laughner says recent comments by Roche that it will start requiring an associate's degree as a minimum requirement for its manufacturing jobs was a wake-up call in an industry where a high-school diploma was often the norm.

Laughner says another misconception about Indiana's manufacturing workforce is that all the jobs are in the automotive sector. While almost a quarter of the state's manufacturing jobs do relate to vehicle production, she notes that 17 percent of Indiana manufacturing jobs are in fabricated metals, 11 percent are in chemical manufacturing, 8 percent are in wood products, 5 percent in production of...