How Saint-Gobain is getting US students to prize factory work

Mark Rayfield started his career at the bottom, collecting trash for three summers in Connecticut. “It was a pretty good job,” he recalls: “The expectations were pretty clear. And nobody was disappointed by the garbage collector — as long as you were there.”

Now, as CEO of Saint-Gobain North America, he is preoccupied by what a new generation of people at the start of their working lives can expect. As predictions intensify about AI disrupting white-collar work, the French-owned building materials manufacturer has launched a workforce development program to convince students that careers in construction and manufacturing can offer a rewarding path “from entry-level to my job today.”

Bringing students to its factories has sharply increased their self-reported interest in manufacturing, explains Rayfield, who joined Saint-Gobain in the 1990s as a sales manager for a division that sold sandpaper. It has also been “incredibly energizing” for Saint-Gobain employees to share why their work matters to them, he adds.

The US faces an estimated shortfall of 1.9 million manufacturing workers by 2033, and Rayfield says Saint-Gobain needs “more people building houses, putting roofs on, and doing drywall manufacturing.” But he sees signs of hope for the talent pipeline, noting that rising college costs are driving some students toward careers that don’t demand a degree. Retaining and attracting employees has also become easier since the post-pandemic tightening of the labor market, he notes.

Saint-Gobain’s initiative is one of several from companies that are looking to change the narrative about “essential economy” careers in the US, working with peers and frontline colleagues rather than waiting for governments to act.

“I think there’s enough people now engaged” in the challenge, Rayfield says. “I feel like we’re making headway.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: You launched this workforce pipeline development program earlier this year. What problem are you looking to solve?

Mark Rayfield: There’s been, in the last decade, a need for more people entering the manufacturing and construction workforce. And we have a strong belief that these are very, very good careers. So we want to expose the next generation in high schools and vocational schools to what these careers mean. Let them get into our factories and see our employees and see that it’s not your 1950s manufacturing job, where you’re hammering the same nut as it goes by. They’re AI-enabled, they’re tech-enabled, they’re industry 4.0, they’re mechanical engineering jobs, and they’re extremely rewarding. Our Sustaining Futures, Building Communities [program] allows our local plants to connect with local schools, both in the school and in the plant, to give them experiences and visibility into what a career in manufacturing [looks like].

Your industry has been worrying about the skills pipeline for a long time now. Do you think there’s something different about this moment?

There’s been a bit of a pivot in the last couple of years where there’s an understanding that a four-year education isn’t the only next step. People are starting to do the cost-benefit analysis of, “I could go to two years vocational school and learn a skill, I could go to a manufacturing company and be trained by them, [or] I could go work for a couple of years to see if I like it, then go back to school.” We’re seeing really some fantastic talents come in through that pipeline.

What would you like to see Washington doing to accelerate this kind of initiative?

For me, we in the manufacturing industry own getting the message out and working as a coalition of the willing and the able to get people interested in it. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking of policy around it. What I really think about is, if we can get our messages to the younger generation and get them exposed to what manufacturing does and what careers you can have there, you get eyes that kind of light up.

How do you see AI changing manufacturing careers?

The next generation coming in, who are digital natives, are using a lot of these AI-enabled tools for problem solving, for forecasting, for driving new systems into our plants, into our business. We use AI in a number of places in the business, to take all of our customer feedback and make sure we get good analysis of where our issues are. We’re driving performance within our plants. AI enables our employees to be more tied to the things that get value out of human touches, and churns a ton of data to give a person a view they may not have been able to get beforehand to make a decision. But it doesn’t make the decision; it just allows the amount of information flowing to the individual to be better and broader.