Chapter 5: Workforce & Economic Development

How to Turn the Maker City into a Magnet for Talent

Published in

Maker City Book

27 min readJun 9, 2016

Maker Cities recognize that they must create jobs and opportunities to attract and retain talent in their cities. Without talent, the Maker City cannot hope to have the energy and vibrancy people expect when choosing where to make their living. As cities like San Francisco and New York, what some call gateway cities, become more expensive, a wide range of American urban centers are emerging as attractive and affordable options, both for individuals to live in and for companies to set up shop.

“More educated workers now leave Manhattan and Brooklyn for places like … Cleveland and Buffalo … than the other way around.” (Source: Daily Beast, 2014)

In short, there is a battle for talent inside our cities.

“One million young adults move each year, according to a 2014 City Observatory study. Their presence in a city is a direct reflection of its health and well-being, the study found, as young migrant professionals are key to fueling economic growth and urban revitalization.” (Source: Governing, 2015)

In this chapter we’ll explore ways to turn a Maker City into a magnet for talent, one that can attract the educated while simultaneously making the most of the talent pool already there.

One underlying theme here is that in the Maker City, formal credentials like a college degree are starting to give way to faster and more lightweight micro-credentialing programs that prove mastery of a specific skill or set of equipment.

Another underlying theme is the importance of training and apprenticeships to enable Makers to build portfolios that showcase skills and accomplishments in a concrete way. Building a strong portfolio is critical, enabling Makers to go after not just traditional work inside companies but also to create their own small businesses and/or hang out a shingle for freelance or gig work.

This ability — to move fluidly from traditional work to a small business to freelance — is important to keep people productive across a lifetime of work.

In the Maker City new types of businesses are expected to bubble up as a direct result of the Maker movement:

Digital fabrication using 3D printing, laser cutters, and related technologies. Expect to see these types of firms cropping up all over, much like copier shops, to revolutionize health care (prosthetics) and dentistry (braces, retainers).
Custom fabricators. Furniture and household goods built on spec.
Makerspaces. These will become increasingly professionalized and home to new businesses, and new learning/opportunities.
Training programs. Focusing on “understandings” and “makings,” as explained later in this chapter.
Job shops. Leveraging 3D printers and CNC machine tools to do short-run, on-demand manufacturing. Also for product development: IoT (internet of things) and robotics.

Of course if these types of businesses are to achieve their potential, we need a cadre of trained Makers available in our cities with the right Maker skills and the capability of creating businesses from scratch, then scaling them.

Maker Skills Currently in Demand Include:

3D Printing and Scanning
CAD/CAM and Graphics
Electronics and Robotics
Machine Shop and CNC
Plastics and Composites
Sewing and Textiles
Programming and Coding
Welding and Fabrication
Wood Shop and CNC
Fluid Power Systems

Andrew Coy is a former Executive Director of the Digital Harbor Foundation, a youth-oriented Makerspace in Baltimore, Maryland; today he serves as Senior Advisor at the White House coordinating Maker activity across the U.S. He notes that:

“We have too many jobs to fill to rely on one or two percent of the population that’s just naturally in an economic position to tinker. Unless we find better on-ramps, unless we find better ways to train workers — in both formal and informal ways–we are never going to have enough jobs or enough people to fill the current demand.”

We believe that cities can use seven main mechanisms to create an environment where Maker talent can thrive:

Embrace independent work and self-employment.
Build skills by focusing on new forms of vocational education (VocEd).
Enlist community colleges to train the next generation of Makers.
Focus on “jobs in the middle” when matching Makers who are seeking traditional employment.
Create new forms of apprenticeships and internships around Making.
Look to Makerspaces as drivers in workforce development.
Shift to new forms of credentials.

1. Embrace Independent Work and Self Employment

Traditional jobs are not the only way to make a living in the Maker City. About 34 percent of the workforce in the U.S. consists of people who work on a freelance basis, accounting for $715B in economic activity each year. (Source: Freelance Union, Elance/Odesk Study, 2014). Freelancers work full-time, part-time, and also moonlight.

Etsy: From Freelance Work to Micro Businesses
Etsy is a company based in Brooklyn that makes a marketplace connecting independent Makers of handmade goods, largely made in the U.S., to buyers all over the world.

Etsy surveyed 94,000 Makers who participate in their marketplace to better understand who they are and what motivated them to focus on selling their handmade goods through the Etsy marketplace. (Source: Etsy Study, 2015)

The study tells us that one attraction for Makers is autonomy: the ability to work independently on their own terms and to build an income stream that does not depend on a traditional employer.

While the majority of Etsy Makers are women working from home and looking for a way to supplement their family’s income; other Makers who work through the Etsy marketplace want to ramp up production and establish small businesses with employees.

Etsy takes care of the e-commerce end of things today. In the future, Etsy will take care of the manufacturing end as it allows Makers in its ecosystem to scale up. There are more than 3,000 sellers worldwide who have been approved to work with outside manufacturing partners on Etsy; 86 percent are working with partners in their home country.

The work Etsy is doing underlines the important role cities can play in giving Makers the tools they need to scale their businesses up.

From an Etsy blog post (2013):

“Rockford is a city of 150,000 people, located two hours west of Chicago. Formerly a manufacturing hub, its keystone employers have left the city, ushering in a wave of high unemployment. One of the benefits of having a strong manufacturing history, however, is that many residents already have skills in the arts (such as watch making and furniture making) that were once the backbone of the local economy. Mayor Morrissey is an enthusiastic advocate of giving Rockford residents the tools that they need to turn these skills into greater economic opportunities.

“A group of Etsy Admin[MD1] went to Rockford in November to further explore the needs of the city and opportunities to work together. [They] were greeted by a diverse group of over 70 stakeholders who gathered to share their thoughts on how Etsy could affect local constituents.

“[This] visit led to a plan for Etsy and Rockford to co-create a Craft Entrepreneurship Curriculum, with Etsy’s platform and marketplace as the learning lab. The aim of the project is to teach people that if they have a craft skill, entrepreneurship and economic opportunity are within their reach. Starting in September, the curriculum will be taught by local Rockford teachers to a diverse range of students.”

The company doesn’t expect every student to become an Etsy seller, but rather that students will apply the skills they learn to any entrepreneurial path they want to follow.

This pilot program has the potential to be not just what Mayor Morrissey calls a “pathway to prosperity” for Rockford, but a blueprint for similar programs across the country and around the world.

Makers need training in how to scale up their businesses with a curriculum that addresses fundamental issues of entrepreneurship.

When Makers Scale Up — What Do They Need to Know?

How to source parts for a product locally or online
How to assemble or kit a product using local manufacturing
How to determine options for fulfillment
How to obtain financing from local sources
How to find the right mentors and gain good business advice
How to develop a solid business plan

Private companies, universities, and Makerspaces can play an important role here, helping Makers get answers to these and other questions.

2. Build Skills by Focusing on New Forms of Vocational Education

For years, vocational education had a bad name; it was where little Johnny, who could read but didn’t seem on path to college, got warehoused. Not any more!

Today’s Maker Cities are borrowing from the tech industry, which has seen a wellspring of training programs springing up to prepare people for jobs as UI/UX designers, front end web developers, data scientists, and the like. Examples include General Assembly, Code Academy, and Galvanize to name only a few.

We have to find faster, more agile paths for our young people to get trained and into the economy. This isn’t traditional workforce development exactly; it’s something else.

Vocademy: VocEd Revisited and Built around Making
Vocademy is a Makerspace that is quite explicit about its curriculum and focus: to train Makers to go into industry by exposing them to the right tools, experiences, and projects.

Started by Gene Sherman in 2013 and based in Riverside, California, Vocademy’s curriculum is designed as an alternative to college for some and as a faster route into productive Making for others. According to Gene:

In today’s society everyone is funneled into college, but as we know that is not the path for everyone

“Some go to work, some go to trade schools, but often you find that part of being young is not knowing what you want to do for the rest of your life.

“Say you think you want to be a welder. Great! You find a program that costs $12K and in six months you are a welder. What if three months in you hate welding and think CNC machining might be a better fit for your skill set? You’ve lost that time and you’ve lost some money. What we offer is like a gym membership, but this is a gym where the treadmills have been replaced with traditional and state-of-the art industrial arts equipment and tools.”

Membership gains you access to tools and space and classes that help you develop basic skills and expertise. Vocademy is a Maker’s dream. The 15,000-square foot Makerspace is filled with 3D printers, a full wood shop, laser cutters, vacuum former, plastics, traditional and CNC machining, welding, CAD, and sewing.

“The shop areas as well as the classrooms are all air-conditioned,” says Gene. “I want to show people that manufacturing isn’t all dirty and dark like you see in the action movies. Forty percent of our current members are women, a number I think will continue to grow as more and more people join.”

Membership is only $99 per month and is open to anyone 14 years old and up. Minors need a parent on the premises, but daily operating hours are an amazing 10am to 10pm seven days a week to meet everyone’s schedules. Typical classes range from six to twelve people, are taught by an instructor who specializes in that field, and cost only a few hundred bucks.

One of their more popular classes is the 40-hour “machine shop skill set.” It costs $1500 and includes raw materials, introduction to cutters/abrasives, blueprint reading, math/measurement, and 20 hours hands-on with the Bridgeport manual lathe and mills. The advanced course moves on to CNC milling and turning via Vocademy’s brand new Prototrak mill and lathe. “Southwestern Industries will be our CNC machine partners for life,” exclaims Gene. “Their machines are perfect for what we are doing, the students love how easy they are to learn and work on. They are an amazing company to work with.” (Source: CNC West, 2016)

While Vocademy started out as a Makerspace focused on young people, particularly those not on a path to college, a curious thing happened. People of all ages and walks of life started to join as members and take courses. This includes older workers who had been edged out of aerospace and other industries in sharp decline in Orange County, the area around Riverside. Industry got involved to sponsor the classes as a way to fill critical openings.

Impact on Schools, Engineering Jobs, and Local Manufacturing
Today, Vocademy has a staff about 30 people and a membership of 250 people. Gene realized early on that community membership was not sufficient to sustain Vocademy. He began developing relationships with schools and businesses in the community. Two large classrooms at Vocademy are used during the day by the Alta Vista Charter School, which serves high school dropouts. The students come to regular class sessions but they can also take advantage of the Vocademy’s hands-on classes, which they can take for free because of funding from the school district. “What attracts kids to Making is that it’s fun,” said Gene. “Our job is to make sure they acquire the skills of Making, which are invaluable.” The charter school serves 100 students and 30 or more have taken classes at Vocademy.

Local businesses also use the space and its instructors to help employees learn new skills such as CAD software. In some cases, Vocademy helps engineers acquire the practical skills they weren’t taught in college. One local manufacturer who had come to a Vocademy open house wrote Gene to say that his machinists were close to retirement and he would have trouble finding people to replace them. “I have good jobs at good pay,” he told him. He wondered if Gene could recommend students for the jobs. Gene likes to talk about the skills gap and he believes Vocademy, as a place and as a concept, can help address it by taking Vocademy nationwide. He is actively looking for partners to expand his business model to hundreds of new locations and helping others open turnkey Makerspaces.

Riverside Mayor Rusty Bailey has been very supportive of Vocademy and declared in November 2013 that Riverside was a Maker City. Congressman Mark Takano said that a visit to Vocademy, which is in his district,” sparked my interest in the Maker movement.” Takano became a founding member of the Congressional Maker Caucus. Takano wrote on Medium: “As the Maker movement continues to spread, becoming an important part of American business and academia, it is drafting a blueprint for rebuilding our manufacturing base and creating a sustainable new sector in our economy.”

3. Enlist Community Colleges

According to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2020 65 percent of all U.S. jobs will require some form of degree or credential that goes beyond high school. About 45 percent of students enrolled in higher education in the U.S. do so through community colleges. Increasingly, businesses and policymakers are turning to community colleges to help fill workforce gaps.

In 2016 the California Council on Science and Technology issued a report and call to action to growing a statewide network of Makerspaces linked to California Community Colleges as a key partner in developing a workforce for the innovation economy. The California system serves 2.1M students; where California goes, we expect other states to follow.

LCCC and Its FabLab
Lorain County Community College (LCCC) is based in Elyria, Ohio and serves 13,000 students per year. LCCC has honed in on Making as a way to ready its students for jobs in industry. A key initiative here is the college’s FabLab, a kind of Makerspace that started at MIT and has spread, thanks to the work of the Fab Foundation, to 1,000 locations in 78 countries.

LCCC’s FabLab is under the leadership of director Kelly Zelesnik; Kelly also serves as Academic Dean of Engineering, Business, and Information Technologies for the college.

“One of the things that I appreciated about the FabLab as a former engineer and engineering manager is that I worked in an R&D environment for a medical device manufacturer. Quite often what would limit our ability to make progress on a project was we designed something, it was made, but it couldn’t be completely made in-house. We would get some parts in and we’d put them together and find out there was a problem.

“And then we would have to turn around and resend it out, and we might have to wait for a week or two. It kind of slows down that design process. But when you have the ability to use all kinds of tools, both Making and digital tools like our digital FabLab, and you can turn something around quickly, it really allows you to design and iterate and get to that first article of inspection or the first prototype fast.

“As an engineer, I would have given my right arm to have access to a digital fablab. So to see that as an opportunity for students in our educational environment, not to mention our entrepreneurs, is very exciting for a few reasons.”

Kelly then goes on to cite exactly why she is excited about the FabLab at LCCC. It turns out highly motivated students. Students return to the lab multiple times and log in additional hours, as needed, to really perfect their projects. The FabLab also gives students a way to build a portfolio of completed projects so as to gain skills and self-confidence and give them project-based work they can showcase to a potential employer.

4. Focus on Jobs in the Middle

Jobs in the middle aren’t blue collar jobs, nor are they jobs for knowledge workers or high-level decision makers. They’re something in the middle and a pathway into the middle class.

Jobs in the middle used to include jobs in health care, jobs in construction, and clerical jobs. (Source: Urban Institute, 2007) More recently, researchers at the Brookings Institute have focused on jobs in the middle in urban manufacturing, the skilled crafts and trades, as well as health care services and devices.

We know from Brookings and others that these jobs in the middle account for perhaps as much as 50 percent of job vacancies inside our cities. (Source: Hozler & Lerman, Brookings, 2009)

To succeed and thrive as a Maker City, cities need to create pathways for Makers to build the skills and display the competencies required for jobs in the middle.

Kelley Kline is Economic Development Director/Chief Innovation Officer in Fremont, California. Fremont is a town with an explicit manufacturing focus; it is home to Tesla among other factories and — as discussed in Chapter 6 — thinks of itself as where Silicon Valley hardware products get built. Kelly articulated to us the acuity of the middle skills problem and how this problem is central to the city’s economic development issues.

“We talk about the middle job syndrome. Some of this may be a little bit of a Silicon Valley problem in that we have a barbell economy, but we also have a barbell workforce. We don’t have a lack of people at entry-level, and we don’t have a lack of these academic people on steroids with PhDs. We don’t have a lot of parents telling their children to aim for the middle. That’s not happening. And that’s where companies are really struggling.

“How do we get the dependable people in the middle that manage the line? Especially in really competitive environments where maybe some of those more capable, generalist people have a lot of attractive options, and the manufacturing companies have to compete for them.

“Veterans are a prime population for these middle jobs: they have qualities of leadership, and just basic know how in how to be a good employee kind of skills: be dependable and work hard, and have the right attitude. Tesla absolutely loves hiring veterans for all those reasons. Yes we have to train them what to do, but they will have the right attitude going into it, and that part is tough to train.

“Today the hardware part of the economy is starting to realize that they need to get kids excited about manufacturing earlier so that they can be more competitive. Kids are making a decision dsuch as, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to sit in front of a computer all day. I actually want to be involved in making something tangible. And that’s really cool, and that’s how I want to spend my time.’

“In many ways, creating a Maker mindset is probably one of the more important things that we can do in terms of building the pipeline. The community colleges have struggled because employer needs are changing so fast. And to make curriculum changes at a community college even, which is the easiest level to make changes at, it can take years. They’re always behind. They try really hard. And all of them now at least have industry councils that are advising them on making tweaks to have some of their programs address certain skill needs. But it just always seems to fall a little bit short. The thing I think has the most promise is to do what Europe has done so well, which is to really develop more of an apprenticeship system.

“ A lot of the technology that you’re seeing now within these advanced manufacturing environments is similar and people need to be exposed to it. It’s just really hard to do that within a community college system. There’s no substitute for actually doing some of this; actually being on a factory floor and having a chance to use some of this stuff. That’s where people are going to get some of the key concepts they need for work.

Workforce Development is Changing in the Maker City
Many workforce development initiatives seem anachronistic, holdovers from an earlier (and simpler) time. Refreshing these programs is valuable, for at least two reasons:

There’s a real need and there’s funding for addressing it. In 2011 the federal government spent $8 billion on workforce development, much of it targeted to vulnerable populations (young people, handicapped, Native Americans) as well as to workers dislocated by changes in selective industries like automobile manufacturing that ended up gutting the middle class. (Source: GAO Report)
Company retention. Cities need a way to fill jobs that, if left vacant, might cause a major employer to leave a city.

Job-matching programs are designed to take the skills the unemployed have and match them to the job openings available through major employers. For job-matching to work you need to a have a well-developed pool of people with the requisite skills. But most of our cities no longer have this. In fact, there is every indication we are facing a skills gap, one that stands as a very real barrier to economic development in our cities.

Harvard Business Review looked at the issue in a 2014 article with the thought-provoking title, “Employers aren’t just whining. The skills gap is real.”

According to Researcher Peter Cappelli, with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the problem is that “too many workers may be overeducated” or at least not armed with the specific skills needed today. The problem is in finding workers with the skills and inclination to fill the jobs in the middle, many of which take advantage of Maker skills. New forms of apprenticeship and internships can fill an essential gap here, providing skills in a manner contextual to work demands.

5. Create New Forms of Apprenticeship and Internships around Making

Traditionally, workforce development was about on-the-job training. These kinds of programs have segued into on-the-job talent programs, recognizing that it’s hard to make much headway by training people against a static set of skills. A more fluid, dynamic, and adaptive model is needed.

This is the approach taken by Shinola, a luxury goods manufacturer based in Detroit.

“It’s one thing to invest in equipment and space,” explained Jen Guarino, VP of Leather at Shinola. “I mean you can buy space, you can buy equipment. But talent is another thing. And so our huge investment has been more in training people how to do this work than it has been in equipment and space. That’s easy stuff to just go buy or place an order on. You don’t place an order on talent, right?”

Shinola needs workers with critical thinking that they can up-skill. To do that they’ve brought in the “masters,” artisans and experts at their trades who have long retired, to come in and re-infuse American manufacturing with the expertise of quality production that was lost in a generation of workers who saw manufacturing exported.

This is a new form of apprenticeship, built around developing not one skill set or trade but around developing talent to work inside companies where making things by hand is an important part of the ethos.

Youth Made
Claire Michaels is Manufacturing Workforce and Hiring Manager for SFMade, which runs an internship program called YouthMade.

YouthMade gives low-income youth direct work experience inside small, urban manufacturing businesses. It is the first program of its kind, and it benefits both youth and employers: youth acquire transferrable skills and work experience while local business owners get to know this valuable talent pool better and nurture prospective employees.

The program started out small, with only 40 young people participating.

Adina Whitaker is a low-income student from the Mission district of San Francisco. Currently she attends San Francisco State University and works at Timbuk2, maker of custom messenger bags, as a YouthMade intern.

Adina started out in production work. She worked in customer service and even had a four-week opportunity to participate on the design team. The company then taught her inventory control, where she thrived and ultimately was responsible for redesigning the flow of the inventory management system in shipping and receiving.

According to Claire Michaels:

“This type of experience is invaluable in that it can expose people to careers they didn’t know existed, to companies they may want to work with, and to the breadth of skills required to run a business.”

YouthMade Intern working side-by-side with a more experienced worker

79 percent of businesses involved in YouthMade said they would consider hiring their intern — assuming they had funds to do so — and 35 percent actually did.

The YouthMade program has since been replicated in New York through a partnership with Juma Ventures, SFMade, and the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation (SBIDC).

Towards New Forms of Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships have long been a means by which to transfer knowledge from an experienced craftsperson to a novice. Many private and public institutions are reinvesting in apprenticeships as a way of bridging the skills gap. In Detroit, JPMorgan Chase has made a $100M commitment to the city’s economic recovery, investing in the Detroit Registered Apprenticeship Program and other workforce training initiatives.

Learn + Earn Apprenticeships
These are formalized programs, generally funded by the DOL (Department of Labor), that target underprivileged workers. Workers earn salaries during their training, which enables disadvantaged adults and young people to participate. The results of learn+earn apprenticeships are to expand economic opportunity.

As explained in a Brookings Institute study:

“Apprenticeship training culminates in career-related and portable credentials that are recognized and respected by employers. It relies mostly on learning in context, an effective method for teaching technical and broader skills such as communication and problem solving. Although the U.S. apprenticeship system is small relative to systems in other countries, nearly 500,000 American workers are in the registered apprenticeship system and at least another 500,000 are in other apprenticeship programs.” (Source: Holzer and Lerman, Brookings Institute, 2009)

6. Makerspaces as a Driver in Workforce Development

Mark Hatch, Former CEO & Co-Founder of the chain of Makerspaces across the U.S. called TechShop, sees Makerspaces as an infrastructure play for cities.

Cities are tasked with the monumental responsibility of responding to unemployment and nurturing the workforce pipeline through high school graduation and college enrollment. Yet, 50 percent of high school graduates do not go to college. Making is increasingly an opportunity to serve as a bridging mechanism to engage youth and underemployed individuals around careers in manufacturing.

Maker working at TechShop in San Francisco

As Hatch sees it, “We still have trade schools. If you want to become a great world-class welder, you go to the trade school, do your 12 weeks or two years. But some of these tools are easy enough to use. You can actually bridge gaps very quickly.”

TechShop was involved in one such program to “bridge the gap” that involved retraining union machinists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Union members were facing a layoff situation and needed to brush up on some of the modern machinery. They already knew parts of the work, but lacked the digital fluency needed to operate at a professional level with computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) equipment.

A new CNC water jet company was opening around the same time as the planned layoff; the machinists needed to be marketable to get the new work. After an 80-hour intensive training program, all twelve participants were able to secure jobs in less than a day.

TechShop now sees great opportunity in scaling this contemporary form of workforce development nationally.

In One Year, Doubling the Number of Patents Produced at Ford Motors
Ford has a number of fabrication facilities all over the globe. At the same time, fewer than five percent of employees are directly involved in designing cars or the parts that go into them.

Mark Hatch, Former CEO of TechShop and Bill Coughlin, CEO of Ford Global Technologies

Ford worked with TechShop to build a world-class Makerspace for Detroit. The idea was to expose workers at Ford to the skills and tools of Makers, so it could better compete in the innovation economy.

Bill Coughlin is a lawyer and the CEO of Ford Global Technologies, LLC where he handles IP and patents for Ford Motors.

“So I was trying to figure, how can we go from surfacing a great idea to prototyping just like IDEO and other such companies do. I was reading in the New York Times about TechShop and a light went off. This is it. This is the right thing to do because here’s a group that has all the right machines for prototyping, has the classes, has the safety procedures, and they have this heart for Makers. So I gave them a call and said, ‘You guys need to come to Detroit and I can help make that happen.’ They couldn’t believe it at first.

The concept we came up with is giving Ford employees a free membership to TechShop for three months plus money for a couple of classes once they submit an invention disclosure to my team.

“So it became part of the invention incentive program within Ford Motor Company. What that did for TechShop was give them anchor tenants, if you will, of members. So I think we committed to 400, maybe it was 500 members, around the clock, annually. They could have that. I wasn’t worried about it because I knew I had more than that in terms of Ford employees who want to invent. So they were able to come to start a new facility with relatively low risk.”

In one year, the number of patents produced at Ford doubled. Plus, morale soared. People at Ford felt empowered to take their ideas on how to improve the cars made there and improve them through rapid prototyping.

7. Shift to New Forms of Credentials

Portfolios are a way to establish that a Maker has not just the requisite skills but also the ability to work in a team setting when solving problems.

Making it in America Project
Bernie Lynch is the Project Manager for The New App for Making It In America, a $3M U.S. Department of Labor Workforce Innovation Fund project. According to Bernie, a big part of what is needed is competency-based skill training.

“It’s not based on hours, it’s based on your ability to perform certain competencies and demonstrate those, [to validate] that yes you have these skills and you’re able to demonstrate that.”

“Strangely, the DOL [Department of Labor] looked at the program, ran it through their skill dictionary, and found that it was like nothing they had ever seen.

“From our point of view, that was mission accomplished. We set out to make sure we were developing something that really meets the needs of Makers and the kind of training protocols that entailed. For the last 30 years in the U.S. we haven’t developed the capacity for people to work with their hands to build products and businesses. That has to change.

“The way our model works is we break it into two categories we call understandings [‘head’] and makings [‘hand’].

“Understandings [are skills] around the notion of … group dynamics and working with groups, or do you know how to create a BOM, which is a bill of materials, which is a really important skill if you’re going to learn how to scale your project and work with the rest of the infrastructure globally in making your products. So we teach a series of understandings of what is the entire process that you need to know to go from making one to making a million.

“Makings [are more technical skills] than the digital tool set. Have you learned the series of equipment, what are the materials, how many materials are you working with, as well as what are the methodologies and processes you need to know so that you’re able to make things?

“Splitting the curriculum up in this way provides a flexible platform that enables people to come and describe the material they want to master, and the equipment to get them where they want to be, or, if they want employment, we can tell them, ‘If you want employment to do X, these are the things you should learn.’”

Whether this type of non-credential skill development program will end up being offered through Makerspaces like Digital Harbor or Vocademy or community colleges like LCCC isn’t clear at this point.

What is clear is that employers increasingly value skill-based training that reflects how work is really done inside industry today, where the focus is on cross-functional teams, problem solving, and rapid prototyping of potential solutions.

Implications for Cities

Workforce development is a key part of the strategy for developing a Maker City ecosystem. Co-location of Makerspaces, educational institutions, and co-working spaces is a great way to build a community that shares skills which can provide a new kind of workforce development. Investor and financier Nathan Schwartz of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania did this to good effect, using his family’s real estate holdings to create a co-working space called Revv Oakland in close proximity to Carnegie Mellon University. This is an easy model for any college town to replicate. Find a local entrepreneur who has succeeded and encourage him or her to give back by setting up a co-working space for small business and Makers, ideally near a university or college. We saw a similar setup, albeit one that was sponsored more directly by the city itself, in Chicago’s Hyde Park that now has an innovation center near the University of Chicago called Chicago Innovation Exchange.
Really look at local regulations and how they will affect people who freelance for a living, as well as emerging entrepreneurs. Make it easy for people to do business with your city. Consider streamlining the processes to apply for a business license, file a DBA (“doing business as”), or apply for a zoning variance.
Create training programs that enable people to gain practical experience in both “understandings” and “makings.” An example of an understanding is crowd sourcing, taking advantage of platforms like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and Fundable to help a Maker with startup ambitions get financing and figure out product-market fit in an accelerated time window. An example of makings is the type of training Vocademy is doing, to enable people to quickly and easily learn how to use machines like a 3D printer or a CNC-controlled lathe.
Create mentorships, apprenticeships, and internships. Mentorships/apprenticeships are being reinvented thanks to the Maker movement at companies like Shinola that encourage master Makers to transfer their knowledge of production techniques to Makers who are less experienced. Internships are likewise undergoing a sea change. High-school level interns can do highly productive work as we saw when we discussed Adina Whitaker, the intern working at Timbuk2 thanks to YouthMade. When structuring mentorships, apprenticeships, and internships move beyond skills training to application of skills in a work setting. The Department of Labor has funds available for Learn+Earn internships that enable disadvantaged populations to take on internships. DOL funds may also be available to target apprenticeships and internships at older workers who have been edged out of one career and now need to be retrained to enter another.
Think in sprints not marathons. A four-year degree program is a marathon that ends with a diploma. Think instead of sprints that end with completed projects; such sprints are a better fit with today’s fast-moving economy. The examples of non-traditional workforce development programs we’ve cited here have built curriculums with courses that last anywhere from three to sixteen weeks, long enough for the Maker to find out if working with a CNC lathe is something they really want to do and short enough that the skills acquired are not immediately out of date. A system of micro credentialing could help here, to give Makers a way to gain validated recognition for the skills and competencies they’ve accrued.
Job matching may or may not work. As Bernie Lynch points out, one challenge is that the skills needed to succeed as a Maker defy easy categorization. The fast pace of business is another: by the time you train up a worker in a particular set of skills, the job may have disappeared. We saw this happen in the U.S. in 2008 when we tried to retrain construction workers for jobs in the solar industry. By the time training was complete, many of the jobs had moved offshore.
Makerspaces provide informal workforce development. Policy leaders like Andrew Coy believe that Makerspaces of all kinds are important to job creation. They can be large and freestanding, or smaller and embedded within libraries, schools, or rec centers. Wherever they exist, know that Makerspaces are enablers. They enable people to experience a 3D printer and CNC equipment for the first time, get skills-based training they need, and build a portfolio of completed work, one they can leverage into either full-time employment or freelance work. Making is deeply personal so it pays to invest in at least one or more Makerspaces that are large enough to include a range of equipment. If your city does not have the resources to do this on its own, consider teaming with TechShop or Makerbot, both of whom are adept at finding corporate sponsors.