The Manufacturers Alliance is reporting that manufacturing isn’t growing as fast as they’d hoped but high tech manufacturing is doing nicely, thank you:
Interestingly, they nevertheless expect the U.S. manufacturing sector to expand at a faster rate than the greater U.S. economy, forecasting manufacturing production growth of 5.7% in 2010 and 4.7% in 2011. Digging a bit deeper, it’s a substantially different economy environment for high tech vs. ‘non-high tech’ companies. While non-high tech output is only expect to grow by 5.1% and 4.3% in 2010 and 2011 respectively, high-tech production is forecast to surge by 14.5% and 13%. It’s a completely different economy for those in the high-tech space.
and the projected hiring by manufacturers won’t be as high as they’d thought:
While the association expects 650,000 manufacturing jobs to be created through 2011, this is a sharp drop of about 350,000 from the 900,000 new jobs previously expected for the period, back in May. Hiring will likely be skewed towards the high tech industries where there’s double-digit production growth, so high tech is the place to be.
It’s a bit hard for me to imagine 40 to 50 year old guys who’ve spent the last 20 or 30 years in housing construction getting into high tech manufacturing.
I talk to a lot of people in manufacturing for my day job, and none of them seem to be able to define what “high tech” means in their industry with any sort of precision. So I find those numbers fuzzy, to say the least.