Changing the Perception of Technical Careers

Winifred Opoku’s “Who Will Build It?” (Issues, Winter 2026) rightly names a cultural hierarchy that undervalues technicians and technologists while constraining the United States’ manufacturing capacity. From the vantage point of community and technical colleges, however, the challenge begins even earlier than postsecondary training capacity or credential recognition. The most consequential bottleneck is a lack of early, sustained awareness of technical careers—before students have self-selected out of them.

Community and technical colleges serve as the primary on-ramp to applied science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and advanced manufacturing careers, yet too often we meet students only after perceptions about “who belongs” in engineering and technology have already hardened. By high school—and in many cases by middle school—students have absorbed powerful messages that success means a four-year engineering degree, while hands-on technical work is framed as a fallback rather than a first-choice profession. This cultural sorting happens long before workforce initiatives attempt to intervene.

Addressing technician shortages therefore requires shifting from episodic outreach to continuous engagement models that expose students early and repeatedly to real people, real workplaces, and real career trajectories. Programs such as the Micro Nano Technology Education Center’s Advanced Technology Technician Training (AT3) model demonstrate how this can be done. Rather than treating workforce development as a late-stage intervention, AT3 creates weekly, sustained interaction among high school students, community college students, university partners, and industry leaders. These regular touchpoints—industry talks, lab demonstrations, mentoring, and project-based learning—normalize technical careers and make applied pathways visible, credible, and aspirational.

This continuity matters. One-off career fairs or short-term grants do little to counter years of cultural messaging that elevates abstraction over application. In contrast, sustained exposure enables students to see technicians and technologists not as supporting actors but as central contributors to innovation ecosystems. It also enables earlier recruitment into stackable credentials, dual enrollment, and work-based learning—pathways that shorten time to employment while preserving upward mobility into advanced degrees for those who choose them.

Importantly, community colleges are uniquely positioned to anchor this work. Our proximity to K–12 systems, regional industry, and universities allows us to function as translators across the entire pipeline. But this role requires being engaged as equal partners from the outset, not as downstream training providers added after research agendas and funding structures are already defined. When community colleges lead or colead workforce strategies, then recruitment, curriculum alignment, and industry integration can begin earlier and operate at scale.

If the United States is serious about rebuilding manufacturing capacity, it must invest not only in training technicians, but in making technical careers visible, valued, and accessible early in students’ academic lives. Legitimizing applied pathways is not simply a matter of rhetoric or policy alignment—it is the result of repeated human interaction, sustained mentorship, and clear lines of sight from classroom to career. Programs that institutionalize this continuity may be the most powerful workforce intervention we have.

Jared Ashcroft

At a moment of renewed national focus on industrial capacity, Winifred Opoku’s essay deserves careful attention. She proposes that solving the US manufacturing workforce shortage—especially among technicians and technologists—and restoring US manufacturing leadership will require a culture shift in how factory-floor workers are recognized and integrated.

This aligns with our call, first published in the 2024 Issues article “The Technologist,” for policymakers to better understand the critical role technologists could play, and to invest in developing a technologist workforce. As a sign of progress, the US Department of Defense Industrial Base of Analysis and Sustainment program has now funded the creation at MIT of the Technologist in Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP) to educate manufacturing technologists to better position the United States to lead in advanced manufacturing.

As part of her solution, Opoku envisions realigning value systems by engaging more stakeholders to elevate community colleges. But more is needed. We recommend focusing on manufacturing firms—not simply to signal demand and offer work-learn opportunities, but as entities that themselves can improve their hiring practices, technology adoption, and operations.

Why focus on companies? They drive manufacturing growth. But unlike in Germany or Japan, US manufacturing productivity has stagnated since 2010. This means investing in company productivity—improving operations and adopting new technology—needs to go hand-in-hand with investing in worker competence.

To gauge potential returns, consider TechAMP. Since its launch in August 2025, employers are showing just how powerful working with companies is. The program is not open enrollment. It operates only in regions where companies commit to filling a cohort with technicians employers nominate to be upskilled to technologists over 12 months. Students’ capstone projects are not in the lab or classroom. Students work with their employers to identify pain points in their factories. In an earlier pilot, students presenting their projects reported saving their companies from $50,000 to $500,000.

In turn, companies saw the value of their newly upskilled workers. Some companies are considering revising their floor operations to take advantage of their workers’ new capabilities. And some are revising their hiring practices to double their workers’ wages to $40–50 per hour. To see how significant this might be, remember that US manufacturing jobs used to be considered a pathway to the middle class. The wage premium for manufacturing work for people without college degrees was 40% in the 1960s—while today it’s 2%.

The time is right to elevate technicians and technologists. For the first time in 50 years, US workers with associate’s degrees had a lower unemployment rate than those with bachelor’s degrees in the second half of 2025. And 77% of Gen Zers report that it’s important to find jobs that are hard to automate, pointing out that many blue-collar jobs are safer from automation than white-collar jobs.

There are encouraging signs. In addition to the training programs that Opoku references, federal programs are making promising investments in manufacturing workforce development. For example, the Department of Defense supports the Manufacturing Technology program, the National Science Foundation supports the Advanced Technological Education program, and the Department of Labor recently has announced it would provide $145 million to fund performance-based registered apprenticeships.

Even so, ensuring that companies—particularly small to medium-size enterprises—change how they produce and who they value is imperative to bringing the author’s sensible and needed vision to fruition.

John Liu

Bill Bonvillian

Julie Diop