Sarah Boisvert, author of The New Collar Workforce: An Insider’s Guide to Making Impactful Changes to Manufacturing and Training, interviewed roughly 200 manufacturers from startups to large companies asking their personnel needs. What I saw was that the bulk of skills gap is really not in engineering or the higher-level areas, like R&D.  It’s more in the operators and technicians.  Many people told me good engineers are a dime a dozen today, but try to find a digital machinist.  I can’t adopt new technology like 3D printing because I don’t have anybody to run the machines.

Add some on-the-job experience to an associate degree and these technicians can command over $100,000 annually.