At Dutchland Inc. in Gap, workers pour concrete and cut rebar to fashion panels for the tanks and custom-designed wastewater storage treatment plants purchased by private developers, municipalities, even the U.S. military. The company is a Lancaster County success story, employing 154 in good-paying construction jobs.

But Steve Grosh admits there are times he wonders if the company will be able to find all the skilled workers it needs to keep growing down the road.

"Manufacturing gets a bad rap," said Grosh, Dutchland's vice president of human resources. "People think it's gone from this country but it's not. … There are good-paying jobs, high stability and high benefits."

But kids and their parents, he said, tend to have this idea of manufacturing as grimy, tedious and prone to layoffs. So parents steer their children away from the industry — just as companies like Dutchland need them more than ever.

At a summit convened earlier this month by the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board, manufacturers from around the county fretted publicly about what economists have called the "skills gap," a shortage of workers with the abilities and knowledge necessary to fill manufacturing jobs.

Local manufacturers say there's definitely a skills gap in Lancaster County; the talk, at the WIB summit, was how to fill it.

And while that includes better training programs at local schools, and more communication between businesses and those schools, it also involves changing perceptions, said Scott Sheely, WIB executive director.

"People are not wanting to go into manufacturing," Sheely said. "But there are jobs here, there are careers here."

And if companies can't fill those jobs, he said, "those companies will go away."

The breakdown

The demise of manufacturing — in Lancaster County, at least — has been greatly exaggerated.

Among all sectors, manufacturing is tops in the number of jobs, employee earnings and total output, said Sheely. According to WIB figures, manufacturing here accounts for $12.5 billion in annual sales. The industry — which includes food processing, metals and metal fabricating, construction and commercial printing and more — employs 38,229, 13 percent of the county's workforce. And it pays 20 percent of all wages; the average annual salary for manufacturing jobs in 2011 was $64,415.

Hidden in that average manufacturing wage is more evidence of a problem.

Not only are fewer young people pursuing manufacturing careers, said Sheely, but the baby boom generation — which has skewed that salary figure upward — is in the process of retiring.

According to WIB projections, that means between now and 2021, hundreds of manufacturing jobs will open up.

But will employers be able to fill them?

"There's not much of a base of skilled workers for us to pull from," said Steven Bright, manager of business analysis at Alcoa, in Manheim Township. "Particularly in the craft positions, like electrical or mechanical maintenance, when we advertise [an open position] we get a pretty limited pool of applicants."

At the very least, Bright said, Alcoa needs students with "good functional math skills, reading skills, safety consciousness, integrity and the ability to work with diverse work force. … Once they're here, we can develop them, work with them if they've got the motivation."

But the company also needs workers who can hit the ground running, who won't need on-the-job training because they've gotten it all in school. Alcoa has partnered with the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, and has hired a number of Stevens grads as electricians. And Alcoa sees a need to forge new training programs with other schools to fill different specialty positions.

The WIB has mapped out a "production career pathway," a list of industrial positions and the skills, training and courses applicants need to be considered qualified to fill them. The occupations covered — including welders, machine operators, truck drivers and more — are expected to be the fastest-growing group of occupations in the county over the next decade. Many require extensive science, technology, engineering and math skills, plus post-high school training.

Starting wages in general, Sheely said, range from $12-$18 per hour.

Public perception

But many manufacturers feel they're fighting significant headwinds in terms of public opinion. The perception of manufacturing as an industry in decline has led to significantly fewer students interested in pursing a career in manufacturing.

"The perception's rooted in what's happened over the past 30 years," said Gardner Carrick, vice president of strategic initiatives at The Manufacturing Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers, who spoke at the WIB summit. "Everything from the closing of the steel mills in Pittsburgh to what's been going on in Detroit has contributed to this image of manufacturing as an undesirable workplace environment, physically tough and non-intellectual. Plus, combined with stories of layoffs, people think, 'What kind of job security would I really have?' "

The image, he said, is at odds with the reality of modern manufacturing.

"You walk into a modern plant, it may be the most high-tech place you'll experience at any job in the country," he said. Employees work on "million-dollar machines"; fixing them often does require a college education.

"So you're able to tell parents who say, 'Hey, my kid's going to college' that college is important," Carrick said. "They'll be earning industry-based certifications, and will be making a pretty good wage when they get out."

Sheely, of the WIB, said that message needs to resonate in Lancaster County for the county's economy to thrive in the future.

"We're only putting a small number of people into these pipelines," he said. "We need to be putting in a much bigger number."

gsmart@lnpnews.com