Industrial Base Development Program

The Industrial Base Skills Development Program (IBDP) creates growth for general economic recovery by creating opportunities for youth to build critical workforce skills, building industrial talent to meet critical production needs.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, and the regional supply chain issues surrounding PPE and medical technology, has dramatically highlighted the need for more skilled workers to ensure locally and regionally secure supply chains. The pandemic has challenged the U.S. defense industrial base and its workforce to meet increasingly complex and technically demanding industrial output requirements at high speeds, amidst highly globalized and competitive supply chains, while our adversaries apply subversive economic tradecraft. Further compounding the issue, the Department of Defense (DoD) and many of its suppliers find themselves enmeshed in broad and fierce domestic competition for industrial talent to meet critical production needs for PPE and medical devices.

Studies project a requirement for nearly 3-1/2 million U.S. manufacturing workers over the next decade, but skills gaps will result in over 2 million of those jobs going unfilled. The interagency task force study responding to Presidential Executive Order 13806 reported significant workforce problems affecting every defense manufacturing sector,  directly effecting the ability of the US to maintain domestic supply chain coherence in case of pandemic or national disaster. Specific workforce skill shortages affecting the DoD are additive manufacturing and composites specialties, and CNC machining of  metals, composites and optical materials  The task force study encourages the US to foster education in digital manufacturing skills and process knowledge, specifically the use of CAD/CAM, digital ERP and PLM systems, including production planning/operations/work instruction systems, production/machine controls and industrial control systems. This kind of workforce is not created overnight, but must be fostered from existing educational systems and their participants, ideally as part of high school and grade school programs. 

The recent pandemic has highlighted the important contributions of younger entrepreneurs and scientists who are using additive manufacturing and CNC skills to produce PPE, ventilator parts, adapting existing products or inventing new ones to help fight the pandemic.  These small companies  are manufacturing parts on-demand locally, but exchanging small digital files globally. These innovations have highlighted the ability of the new digital economy to supply on-demand manufacturing capability to save lives.   Current approaches to enabling this next generation of skilled and savvy inventors and scientists to-date have largely focused on STEM efforts within the nation’s educational system, and not additive manufacturing, CNC, and other skills needed that are making positive regional impacts during the COVID-19 pandemic.