Kevin Creehan, President of Schultz-Creehan Holdings, Inc., spoke at the NewVa Corridor Technology Council on "Innovative Principles in Product Development." This post originally appeared on Handshake 2.0.
From Dan Smith, Editor, Valley Business FRONT:
Kevin Creehan, president of Schultz-Creehan Holdings, Inc. in Blacksburg, Virginia, a high-tech engineering firm, made some strong points about manufacturing’s future in a talk at the NewVa Corridor Technology Council Technology & Toast on September 18, 2008.
Kevin Creehan’s premise is that we need to be selective about the manufacturing jobs we try to keep in the United States and avoid putting our fingers in the dike for every leak that springs. He believes there are some jobs we won’t really miss and insists that many of manufacturing’s old-style base jobs are going unfilled as an aging workforce retires, anyway.
Creehan says there are fewer manufacturing jobs in the U.S. now than there were 50 years ago, that in Virginia there are 47,000 manufacturing employees in the 55-64 age range, and that between 2007 and 2012, 47,000 vacant manufacturing jobs will be unfilled. He calls it a “supply and demand problem with labor.” Jobs go overseas, he says, “because we don’t pay enough, because of the image…”
According to Creehan, a 50 percent increase in productivity has compensated to a degree for the losses, but “the jobs that will stay here have to do with interesting products; they’ll take training and thought; they’ll use new and exotic materials that foreign workers don’t understand yet.”
Added 9/26/08: Kevin's Creehan's PowerPoint slides and a video of his talk are here, courtesy of The NewVa Corridor Technology Council, NCTC.
The Valley Business FRONT Post is written by Dan Smith, Editor, Valley Business FRONT, a monthly magazine featuring the business communities of the Roanoke and New River Valleys of Virginia.
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The opinions Dan Smith expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0.
Schultz-Creehan Holdings, Inc. is a high-tech engineering firm focused on the research and development of innovative solutions for industry. Formed by Dr. Kevin Creehan and Dr. Jeff Schultz in 2004 to address complex product development challenges through expertise in materials science and industrial engineering, Schultz-Creehan develops and manufactures products and processes to serve clients in the aerospace, defense, medical device and industrial markets.
You can read the latest news from Schultz-Creehan Holdings, Inc. on the Schultz-Creehan blog.
Schultz-Creehan Holdings, Inc. is a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks.
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