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Marysville, Ohio, is home to the first Honda manufacturing plant in America. It opened in 1979 with 64 workers assembling the company’s Motocross motorcycle. Auto production soon followed. Now in its 40th year of production, the original plant, along with several nearby operations, employs 13,000 workers in the northwest part of the state. Ohio Rep. Jon Cross, whose district lies just north of the Marysville plant, has visited the facility and seen the work being done there. “It’s highly technical, highly skilled,” he notes, more of what one might expect at a tech company rather than a car manufacturer. More and more, that is the reality of work in manufacturing and other sectors of the Midwest’s economy — the result of advances in technology, automation and robotics. For states, that means economic growth depends in part on having a highly skilled, adaptable workforce able to keep up with the fast pace of change. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , as of June, there were 1.5 million job openings in the Midwest (see map for state-by-state data), and many businesses say they can’t find enough people with the necessary skills to fill the vacancies that they have. Parts of this region, too, have among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation; Ohio’s is actually a bit over the national average, but it’s still only 4.2 percent. “That basically means we’re at full employment, and that’s really great for the economy,” Cross says. “But the downside is that businesses are [struggling] to grow and find new employees. “Where are these new employees going to come from?” The answer to that question, in Ohio and other states, is more complicated than simply relying on new high school or college graduates. “Colleges are not pumping out enough people to fill the new positions that are going to be available in our workforce in the next three to five years,” Wisconsin Sen. Dan Feyen says about the labor market challenges in his state. “So we need to make sure that we can take people within our existing workforce and put them in jobs where they can excel.”

Marysville, Ohio, is home to the first Honda manufacturing plant in America. It opened in 1979 with 64 workers assembling the company’s Motocross motorcycle. Auto production soon followed. Now in its 40th year of production, the original plant, along with several nearby operations, employs 13,000 workers in the northwest part of the state. Ohio Rep. Jon Cross, whose district lies just north of the Marysville plant, has visited the facility and seen the work being done there. “It’s highly technical, highly skilled,” he notes, more of what one might expect at a tech company rather than a car manufacturer. More and more, that is the reality of work in manufacturing and other sectors of the Midwest’s economy — the result of advances in technology, automation and robotics. For states, that means economic growth depends in part on having a highly skilled, adaptable workforce able to keep up with the fast pace of change. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , as of June, there were 1.5 million job openings in the Midwest (see map for state-by-state data), and many businesses say they can’t find enough people with the necessary skills to fill the vacancies that they have. Parts of this region, too, have among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation; Ohio’s is actually a bit over the national average, but it’s still only 4.2 percent. “That basically means we’re at full employment, and that’s really great for the economy,” Cross says. “But the downside is that businesses are [struggling] to grow and find new employees. “Where are these new employees going to come from?” The answer to that question, in Ohio and other states, is more complicated than simply relying on new high school or college graduates. “Colleges are not pumping out enough people to fill the new positions that are going to be available in our workforce in the next three to five years,” Wisconsin Sen. Dan Feyen says about the labor market challenges in his state. “So we need to make sure that we can take people within our existing workforce and put them in jobs where they can excel.”