The Puget Sound Business Journal recently brought together a panel of Puget Sound manufacturers to discuss the problem, verging on crisis, of finding skilled workers.

In a nutshell: “Manufacturers can’t find workers to fill open positions.” And these are good-paying blue-collar positions.

Things have gotten so bad that several manufacturers, tired of waiting for educators and policymakers to help them, have taken matters into their own hands and created their own in-house training and apprenticeship programs.

The neglect comes at the state’s peril. The approximately 300,000 state residents employed in manufacturing made, on average, almost $85,000 in 2013, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. That’s 36 percent higher than the average statewide wage. Failing to feed that pipeline could have devastating effects on the economy.

“We’re swimming upriver when it comes to finding skilled help,” said Roland Ramberg, CEO of The Gear Works, which employs about 100 workers at the South Park location it has occupied since 1946. “Skilled machinists just do not come into the door.”

Several reasons are cited for the shortage. For starters, a lack of high school vocational classes. The Journal notes:

Seattle Public Schools, like districts across the country, began pulling back from vocational education — known officially as “career and technical education” — 20 years ago, partially due to a mounting belief that “shop classes” were nothing but holding tanks for poor students.

Which is ironic, because it’s exactly those lower-income, more economically disadvantaged students who would arguably have the most to gain from skilled manufacturing jobs, since a four-year college diploma is not required.

The article continues:

The district founded the Seattle Skills Center three years ago to bulk up its career and technical education offerings, but with the exception of an aerospace and engineering class offered at Rainier Beach High School, most of those programs don’t deal with skilled manufacturing.

CorePlus, seeks to fill that gap. Founded in Yakima in 2012, CorePlus is now offered at 30 locations to students from more than 160 high schools. It trains students in skilled trades such as metal fabricating, aerospace and marine technology, machining and construction.

“It’s a huge challenge, because they took all the shop classes out of schools,” said Scott Anderson, a CorePlus board member and president of Seattle’s CSR Marine, a yacht repair facility that employs 60 in Ballard and Des Moines and is seeking to hire 10 more. “It’s a broken system, and it’s a branding issue we have to fix, and we have to market it. It’s OK if your kid is blue collar and he’s making $75,000 a year.”

Thomas McLaughlin, executive director at the Center for Advanced Manufacturing Puget Sound, adds that the workforce and vocational programs and manufacturing industry associations in the state don’t effectively communicate with each other and tend to “focus too much on policy and not enough on curriculum.”

Kudos to the Puget Sound Business Journal for covering this issue. It’s hugely important to our workforce and our economy, and we’ll be keeping an eye on it as well in the months ahead.

You can read the Journal’s article here, and editorial here (subscription required).