Manufacturers hope to inspire the next generation by inviting them inside

Thousands donned safety glasses and orange vests during the first week of October as they toured and learned about manufacturing facilities across the country.

National Manufacturing Day officially took place Oct. 4, but many companies had tours throughout the week. The event is meant to inspire the next generation of skilled workers.

The project, organized by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Manufacturing Institute, pushes manufacturers throughout the country to open their doors to students, educators and the community to give them a chance to see how a modern factory works.

The Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation's Detroit facility hosted students and community members with an aim to build the next generation of composites manufacturing, said Emily King Kinsey, IACMI's public information manager. IACMI is a national research and development consortium working in composites adoption integration, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., with locations throughout the U.S. The focus of the facility in Detroit is to lightweight the automotive industry through research and development.

"Manufacturing a lot of the time has a connotation for being dirty and kind of a grungy job, and we can show, through Manufacturing Day and bringing students into our facility, the sort of high-tech and new direction that manufacturing is going in and that it's a very sophisticated industry," she said.

During the coming decade, manufacturers will need to fill 4.6 million jobs and Manufacturing Day is an opportunity to connect the future workforce to potential employers, according to a release from the project. Last year, 275,000 people participated in nearly 3,000 events across North America.

Dakkota Integrated Systems also welcomed a few Detroit-area high schools throughout the week for tours of its facility in Brownstown, Mich. The auto supplier, which does sequencing for interior parts and makes headliners, had students work in pairs on a Lego kit, with each set missing a piece or certain instructions. The lesson illustrated how skills like problem-solving and attention to detail are needed in jobs like quality control.

"Manufacturing Day allows high school students to come out to a plant that actually deals with industry, [to] touch, feel, see, smell what goes on in the plant itself and get an opinion for themselves," said Jordan Lesinski, facilities and engineering manager with Dakkota.