Silicon soulmates: Maybe your most loyal teammates

In this episode of People B4 Machines, Amanda Cupido sits down with The Manufacturing Millennial, Jake Hall, to debunk the myth that automation is a "job killer." Jake shares why now is the critical time to deploy technology to stay ahead of competitors and how machines actually create higher-value opportunities for the human workforce.

They dive into practical strategies for employee retention, including the surprising success of the four-day work week in factories. From building community presence to leveraging social media for recruitment, Jake offers a masterclass on balancing high-tech tools with a people-first culture.

For more bold questions and sharp insights, visit www.peopleb4machines.com. Remember, the future isn’t fully automated—it’s people-powered.

Transcript

Jake Hall 0:00

There's no better time than now in a lot of cases to deploy this technology because you're not going to see an exponential scale of opportunity in the next 12 to 24 to 36 months. It's just not going to happen. But what is going to happen right now is your competitors are going to be deploying this technology and leveraging this. They're going to then always be 12 to 24 months ahead of you and understanding technology. And if and if and if you want to catch up, you're going to have to pay more.

Amanda Cupido 0:41

Welcome to People B4 Machines, conversations on the chaos of factory automation from Monday morning to the very near future. I'm Amanda Cupido, a speaker, author, and entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology and humanity. Today, we're talking about how machines may be your most loyal teammate. I am joined by Jake Hall, who is also known as the Manufacturing Millennial. He is an advocate for manufacturing, automation, and skilled trades and has helped revolutionize the way people and companies present through social media. He has a background in product design and manufacturing engineering and has worked for over a decade in the space. On LinkedIn, he's got over 100,000 followers and more than 150 million views on his content, which has led to him being known for igniting conversations about the latest in manufacturing and automation and naturally sparks excitement in the current and future workforce in the industry. I am excited to get excited. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Hall 1:48

Hey, man, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Amanda Cupido 1:50

Now we got to start off with getting to know your name. How did you become the manufacturing millennial?

Jake Hall 1:55

Yeah, I mean, I think the first like thought of it came back in 2018, 2019. I was at an automation distribution conference at the time when I was still working for an automation distributor. And one of the questions came up early on was like, hey, how do we get this next generation excited about it? You know, how do we solve these workforce problems? So I'm sitting in a room and I'm probably the only person there under the age of 40. You know, your typical manufacturing conference, you look across the room, it's the average 60-year-old white guy in a suit that's old, who's been around for four decades. You know, and I'm like, well, wait a second. I'm this young kid, I'm ambitious. How can we not have, you know, other people here representing the next generation who's in manufacturing right now and who's gonna who has the opportunity to be in it? So they're talking about millennials and all this stuff, and you know, millennials are this, millennials are that, millennials have this personality. I'm like, well, I'm a millennial, I'm in manufacturing, I'll just be the manufacturing millennial as a fun tagline at the at that. And that's kind of how the name came about, sitting in the conference being told how bad millennials were because we didn't want to do anything. And I figured I'd uh kind of embrace the uh the tagline.

Amanda Cupido 3:03

I love it. Well, way to lean in and nothing against any 60-year-olds or beyond in suits. Like we, you know, we're welcoming of all ages here, but I do see how it carved out a niche for yourself.

Jake Hall 3:15

Absolutely it did. And I think it's one of those things is you know, you look at the industry, everyone has to play on different generations and give each one a little bit of a hard time. So I'll take the uh I'll take the banter and run with it.

Amanda Cupido 3:28

Sounds good. All right, well, let's get into our topic for today now. I think it's a bit of a myth that automation automatically means that the human workforce is gonna shrink, but that's still being perpetuated. How are you seeing this play out?

Jake Hall 3:42

Well, I think you know, automation does a couple things, right? When when we look at automation as a whole, automation is going to do tasks that humans are doing right now. We uh automation will replace things that humans do. But I think what the opposite side of that, automation creates opportunities that currently don't exist. So you're gonna you're gonna see a job shift in descriptions in the industry. And you know, you go back to, oh gosh, the the bank teller at the time, right? Remember when ATMs came out? People thought that ATMs were going to replace the bank. You wouldn't need a bank teller anymore. Well, it turns out we have millions of ATMs in the industry right now, and we still have more banks than ever. Um, you know, we thought that uh, you know, the interesting thing is if you look back to the year 1890, I think, here in the United States, the most common professional job description was a farmer. And and so everyone at the time, when the tractor came out, right? Everybody thought everyone was going to go unemployed, no one was gonna have any jobs, no one could survive. Well, lo and behold, look at all the other industries and opportunities when people didn't have to simply work on a farm 10 hours a day to provide, but they they were given other opportunities. Look at all the opportunities that opened up for both men and women and children. More kids went to school, more women had opportunity, more men would be able to be creative and inventive and do things and build businesses. Automation at that level of agriculture changed the industry. And I think what we're gonna see right now is as well is we have we have like right now in the United States alone, 500,000 open jobs right now in manufacturing. 500 open,000 jobs. Um, and so people are worried so much about automation taking jobs. I'm like, there's there's 500,000 open right now. It's a lot of those jobs are either a couple things. One is people don't want to do them because they're boring, they're dark, they're dirty, they're dangerous, they're dull, they're unsafe. Or we don't have the qualifications, right? Automation's creating new technologies. Companies are trying to be more competitive, they need the skill sets to do that. So automation going out there and stealing the stuff, I think is a very uneducated term to do that. I think automation is definitely gonna shift how people work. Automation is definitely gonna do tasks that people are gonna do, right? You you go to a food processing or production facility, which is one of the larger automated industries here in the United States. No one wants to work in a freezer eight hours a day lifting a 40-pound frozen box of meat onto a pallet. There's no joy in that, it's not fun. No, you know, maybe, maybe to the 18, 19-year-old kid who wants to use that, it has this gym routine, he has some stuff at that. But no one in their mid-40s or 50s wants to be on the end of line lifting a 40-pound box four and a half feet in the air on a pallet. It's not fun. A robot's great at that. An automation system is great at that. And then what we need is now we need people to build those automation systems. We need we need people to be able to go out there and do maintenance and create this. And and all of a sudden, when we have more stuff that's automated, we have more ability to have accessibility to data, which opens up a whole new skill set of OT and IT professionals in the industry. Yeah. If you want to look at the term, will automation take jobs? Yes. Will automation create jobs? Yes. And I think at the end of the day, it's a much higher positive across income, across opportunity, and across skill sets. So, you know, if you if you if you want to like get very picky, they can, but they're not looking at the entire picture of what automation can create.

Amanda Cupido 7:26

Well said. I want to dig in a little more about employee retention and these jobs that are going unfilled. Do you find that that's there's a lot of human talent being quote unquote wasted right now on tasks that are driving disengagement?

Jake Hall 7:41

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the big thing right now is you look at the the two young generations who are currently in the workforce, millennials, which are going to be the more experienced generation, mid-30s to young 40s is that millennial gap. Then you have the Gen Zs, which are that mid-30s to 20s right now. They grew up in a digital information technological era. They learn through digital tools and technology, they communicate through digital tools and technology, they become independent and have that opportunity to learn. If companies don't adopt technology and you have a person that you hire to come into manufacturing, they feel like they're stepping back 20 or 30 years in the industry because they're still forcing people to write stuff down on a whiteboard and enter some stuff manually into an Excel rather than leveraging what digital tools can do and then be able to then use the expertise of those individuals to make decisions off of that data. It's an opportunity that's lost. Like the one interesting thing, you know, that when I talk to manufacturers, the issue is not getting younger generations to come to work for you. The issue is getting them to stay. Like that, that's the big thing, right? People don't come and work for a manufacturer. The issue is keeping them there for more than 90 or 180 days. Like that's the shift. And a lot of that has to do with workforce conditions, growth opportunities, culture on the floor. Those are opportunities that a lot of times can be addressed with technology to fix those things.

Amanda Cupido 9:10

Okay, let's go further into that because I think there's a lot of leaders who are curious about how to increase their employee retention, instill loyalty. You know, you mentioned opportunities for growth. You're mentioning the technology being there. Of course, compensation plays a role in all this. So why don't you give some tips and advice for leaders who are looking to play to those tactics in increasing their employee retention?

Jake Hall 9:33

Yeah, I I mean the first thing that comes to mind right away is when I talk to a lot of manufacturers who are finding an increase in retention rate. One of them has to do with going to a four-day work week. A lot of companies and manufacturers who are end users and developing products or processes, they had your for a long time their traditional five days a week, nine hours a day. And we're finding out that more companies who switch to a 410 or a 411, their employees love it. Their employees love the opportunity to have more free, flexible life decisions to be able to work a couple extra hours during the end of each day, but then have Fridays off or have Mondays off. And then they can spend time with their family or their friends or be at home or give them opportunities to go and have more decisions and choice in their life. I think that's a big thing as well, is that flexibility. I think more than anything, now younger generations value that flexibility and freedom more than they do a paycheck. And a lot of it, I would say, has to do with the fact is their parents' generation never really forced them to have that independence in a lot of ways. So they could just kind of live in their home. And yeah, there's there's a lot more factors and cost of living and and rent. Like there's a lot of other stuff out there. But I think at the same time, though, a younger generation looks at life differently and experiences differently and will value more flexibility. That's one. The other thing that I really look at is younger generations want to have just as much of an impact as they do opportunity. They want to be able to look at a manufacturing floor or a processor, a company they work for, and they want to see that they can impact and they can create change and really create value to the industry. If they feel that they're just simply there to do a task and not be involved with a team, that's a big turn off as well. Younger generations want to have that change. The other thing that I really look at as well is opportunity for growth and companies giving them the tools and the assets to grow and learn. Companies that are allowing for training opportunities for employees to invest in them for their knowledge to grow, allowing them to give them clear understanding and paths on how to get promoted within the career, either through getting certified to do more tasks, so then they can get paid more, or ways that they can get leadership training to grow within the organization. Those are big things as well around retention. And we're seeing that a lot more, you know, an interesting fact when you look at like the baby boomer generation, the average baby boomer throughout their entire career from going in in the industry will have worked for on average about three different companies throughout their entire career. You look at millennials, and that is about 11 by the time they're 30. You know, so you see a massive shift in terms of older generations were very loyal to the companies, younger generations are very fluid and working for these companies. And it's not a specific industry where you see that number of movement, but the issue is in a lot of cases it hurts manufacturing the most because there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's built around the tasks that these professionals do rather than just like working in retail as a checkout. Right. They're doing there's there's all more critical thinking in a lot of times with manufacturing than there is other industries. So that critical thinking a lot of times hurts the quality, the production, and the product that happens when you have a constantly rotating workforce.

Amanda Cupido 13:02

Fascinating. All right. To summarize, the three big things are having roles that are meaningful where the person's making a difference, providing opportunities for growth and development, and thirdly, going to a four-day work week, which I know for some people will feel wild. Yeah. But have you ever seen it happen effectively in the manufacturing industry?

Jake Hall 13:22

Absolutely. I can live, I could give you a hundred companies right now that have done that. Absolutely.

Amanda Cupido 13:27

And how'd they roll it out? Do you know?

Jake Hall 13:29

I don't I don't know the entire process behind it, but when I'm going out there and I'm doing keynotes and I do straw polls on the audiences, I mean, more and more companies than like when I first did my first straw poll three years ago to where it is now, it was one maybe three years ago. But now, I mean, when I was out in Arizona earlier this year at a manufacturing association conference, there was probably 14 or 15 companies out there, you know, represented by 100 that are doing four-day work weeks.

Amanda Cupido 13:58

That's great to hear for those who might be resistant to that idea and feeling like nobody does that. Like, here's the proofs and the pudding. It's it's happening. I want to go back to attracting talent now, almost like let's let's dial it back even further before somebody even comes through the doors. Do you think that the technology leaders invest in determines who even applies?

Jake Hall 14:18

You know, I think when you look back to the history of the manufacturing industry, manufacturing a lot of times was the center of a community that jobs in the rest of the industry were built on. You would have a manufacturer who would employ a large percentage of the town that would then pull in other small businesses, that would put in grocery stores, that would pull in gas stations and restaurants. You had towns built around manufacturing. And so it was really easy for a lot of times for people to then go want to work for that manufacturer because they that manufacturer was invested in that person's age from a very young time through friends or family. Now we're seeing that I don't think manufacturers are nearly as invested in the communities as they once were. And when you see that, younger generations don't know what's happening in their backyard. They don't know what products are being made, they don't know what jobs are available, what apprenticeship programs and training are available to have an opportunity to go and learn and get paid for it when you graduate high school rather than going out of state or you know to a different area to get a two-year or four-year degree. I think where manufacturers are falling short in terms of engagement and reach is investing in kids at a much younger age to get them involved with STEM programs or robotics or LEGA League or giving them tours to walk through the production floor in the summertime. We're offering those summer internships. It takes a lot more now for a manufacturer to pull in the top-tier talent that it did a long time ago. Because a lot of times you'll have parents that say, oh, don't go work in manufacturing because that's where all the jobs left two or three decades ago. You have the guidance counselors who are encouraging the kids to go get a four-year degree, even if they don't know what they're gonna go into. They say, Oh, just go there for a couple years and get a couple gen eds and don't worry about the money. You'll figure that out later. And that's gonna cost you, you know, $40,000 in student debt when you graduate and you still have a hard time finding a job. They don't help kids out with those long-term decisions. So I think where manufacturers need to start is engaging in a community younger, getting younger generations involved to understand what's happening in their backyard with products and being able to then show those kids what opportunities can exist for them and what career paths they could decide to do when they graduate high school.

Amanda Cupido 16:31

I think these are really great tangible examples for making a difference in the community. And then what about the hiring process itself? Do you have any tips for how they can really recruit when it comes time to post the job?

Jake Hall 16:46

Well, I think the big thing, you know, an interesting fact that I had is like when before social media got massive, you know, hiring managers used to go and look at, you know, a potential employee's Facebook page to see what type of person is this? What type of culture do they have? Are they going to be a good fit to our team? The opposite has happened now, where now all of a sudden you have more potential candidates who are going to your company's LinkedIn page and your company's social page to see is this the type of company that I want to go and work for before they even walk into the interview spot. So what a lot of times companies are missing out on, they're not showing off their people, they're not showing the opportunities that are presented, they're not creating an excitement to showcase this is why you should come to work for this company before you even want to go and step in the door for an interview. So I think, you know, a lot of times beyond the social aspect of what we talk about, getting involved in the community, it's having a presence through social media. I don't think a lot of times companies realize the impact that social media can have beyond just a tool for marketing and sales and trying to find your next customer or retain your clients. It's to showcase you as a company has an incredible culture. And that culture is keeping your employees, that culture is attracting new employees, and that culture is attracting potential clients who want to work with you because you're a good company. And I think that's a big thing that's missed right now. That I think a lot of times older generations don't see the true value of what social media can add and bring to a company.

Amanda Cupido 18:19

Yeah. So there you go. Investing in social media and how you show up online as the early stages of a recruitment tool before you're even posting the job. That's great. We hear a lot about being automation ready. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Jake Hall 18:35

Oh, I think it's one of the thousand buzzwords that are out there. To be out of, to be frank with you. You know, when I think of automation ready, I think a lot of it has to do, I think it's less about the technology and more about the leadership. We could have the best technology in the world that's available to you. But if we don't have a culture of leadership who's willing to create change, invest in that change, and communicate to the employees why this change is happening, it's not going to do well. And you can look at both sides of the spectrum. There's companies who've adopted technology and it's gone extremely well because leadership from the top was a champion of it. Then you look at the opposite where the technology was there, but because leadership didn't take the right steps on how to communicate that with the team from the the top down and then from the bottom up, you you lost an opportunity. So I think automation ready in a lot of cases comes to do is uh the leader, is there a leadership team and champions in place to see the success of what this looks like? Are you leveraging automation because that's what you're being told you should do, or because you see the need and the value for it? I think is another big thing as well. People automate sometimes just because they're told you need it rather than understanding why you need it and finding the areas that are gonna have the best ROI. A lot of times, you know, and it's that balance between scope creep to try to automate too many things versus not automating anything. And I think a lot of times my my biggest suggestion when companies are looking at doing automation for the first time, pick a project that will be successful rather than the one that's going to have the best ROI on it. Because a lot of times the ones that have the best ROI have a lot of times a lot of risk tied to it. Find one that's low risk, maybe not as hard, hard ROI, but then you have more padding built into your process to understand the hidden challenges that companies are gonna face when adopting automation. Is it because you're gonna run into, oh, we didn't have the right skill people in place, we didn't have the right training in place, we didn't have the right infrastructure in place to support this technology. There's a lot of steps besides the pieces of equipment that make automation successful. And so if you can start small in an area that doesn't have the top ROI, but it's one that can have a much higher success rate of learning, start with that and then grow and learn from that. A lot of times people think automation is this idea where we're taking a process and then we're removing the people from it. Automation can simply be a tool within a much larger process to simplify a task. And I think that's where the going back to what the automation ready is, is it's not automation is not defined as lights out robotics and full turnkey systems. Automation can simply be a person's going and they're screwing in a bunch of bolts into an assembly line. And instead of having that robot do it, you simply have an automated screwdriver that's going in to do a disuter screw gun just to simply make it easier. Or you have a simply a vision system that I will look for those. Eight bolts that the operator assembled to automate that quality inspection process. Automation does not need to be the biggest project. It needs to be the one that can be successful early.

Amanda Cupido 22:10

Very strategic thinking there. I love it. Paint me a picture now. We talk, and this is a nice full circle to the beginning of the conversation around debunking the myth that it automation means less humans. All right, we've painted a picture for what automation can handle. What is your vision for what humans will be doing?

Jake Hall 22:28

There's so many levels of that, right? I mean, because we can look at the like we can look at the scale of humanoid robots in 50 years. To answer the first question, I know people are gonna ask, Jake, will humanoids happen? The answer is yes. I very much believe humanoids will happen and humanoids will work in manufacturing at subcapacity. Will it happen soon? No. Will we see humanoid robots in the next 10 years working in manufacturing? Yes. However, I'm in the belief that humanoids are not the answer to automation and manufacturing. Mainly because manufacturing, in a lot of ways, is a controlled assembly or production of a product. When we have a known condition for the most part, we can design automation around those solutions that will be much more productive than a flexible product rather than a flexible solution. And and the best answer is people will say, well, what happens when AI gets when AI gets smarter and enhances humanoids? This is that same technology will also enhance your industrial robots and your mobile robots and your vision systems and your path programming on automation systems. It's not like it's just tied to humanoids. Will we see automation in the future? I think we're always going to see it, but I think we're always gonna see humans in the loop doing these tasks. I mean, you can predict now 100 or 150 years, but that's such an absurd, absurd prediction because 100 years ago, now we didn't even have a PLC. We didn't even have a control system. You know, it was it was such a uh a separate industry at the time. A hundred years from now, we we have no idea what that's gonna look like. But, you know, let's just say in five years. Jake, where's automation gonna be in five years from now? Honestly, truthfully, pretty close to where we are right now. Uh, you know, and we'll see technology be able to support the front end of projects. I think we'll be able to deploy projects at a faster rate. That is one. I think automation is gonna give us better visibility on production that's happening on the floor, either through certain equipment that's happening there. I think we're gonna have less siloed processes. I think we're gonna be able to get a better understanding of how all the different components from the warehouse to the project life management of the system that we're designing to how that product is being manufactured, to how that product is being shipped, to how that product is being supported on the field. I think we're gonna have a much better visibility on how all those tie together long term. But I don't really think we're gonna see this massive level of automation that's gonna change in the next five years. And a lot of that is because we have had extremely advanced changes in the last five, and yet so many companies are not adopting automation the way they should right now. I mean, the fact the fact of the matter is, if I were to go back 20 years ago and I were saying, hey, I can ship you a machine, run it up to a conveyor, and I can have full lights out palletizing on two pallets with a robot in 24 hours, people would have said, how much is that gonna cost? You know, half a million dollars. Well, here's the thing you can go out and buy those solutions for like 125k now, lights out, shipped to you, deployed, ready to go. Like that's the world that we live in today. Yet there's so many companies who are still not adopting that technology today. And that's why I think we're gonna see more automation, but I don't think we're gonna see this new revolution of technology that's gonna make things better, like and easier. Like, I and that's the big thing for me. I always kind of shake my head where people are not automating right now that the way they should be, because it's well, I'll just wait when things are better or things are a lower cost, or things are this. I'm like, there's no better time than now in a lot of cases to deploy this technology because you're not gonna see a an exponential scale of opportunity in the next 12 to 24 to 36 months. It's just not gonna happen. But what is gonna happen right now is your competitors are gonna be deploying this technology and leveraging this. They're gonna then always be 12 to 24 months ahead of you and understanding technology. And if and if and if you want to catch up, you're gonna have to pay more because you're gonna have to pay more to deploy it, you're gonna have to pay more to get more experience, you're gonna have to buy it rather than learn. And that's the biggest thing, you know, how do people be successful in the industry? One, you're first, or two, you pay more. Like that's just that's that that's the truth of competitive, uh the competitive industry these days. So one is adopt automation early, learn from it so you're leading edge, or two, be expected to pay a lot more for it in the future to then be able to be competitive in that. And we're seeing that across the board. We're seeing that in the semiconductor industry, we're seeing that in the food processing industry, we're seeing that in the warehouse of logistics. Look at what Amazon did to revolutionize the commercial industry. They were the first to market to really simplify the ease of consumer buying. And everyone else has had to dramatically catch up. And no matter how much more money Walmart or Best Buy or some of these other companies to trying to catch up, they will have to pay more and more and more to try and keep that advantage going. And it's tough. So yeah, that's what that I guess that kind of goes off to that whole automation ready thing.

Amanda Cupido 27:51

Right. But that's bold and a call to action if I ever heard one. So no better time than now. You heard it here. Um, but before we let you go, I want to ask a curveball question. We like to throw these at our guests. All right. So if every repetitive task disappeared overnight, what new skill or hobby do you think people will rush to start doing or developing?

Jake Hall 28:16

If every repetitive task was eliminated.

Amanda Cupido 28:19

Yeah.

Jake Hall 28:21

That's so weird because it's never gonna happen.

Amanda Cupido 28:24

Uh we're just dreaming of a world where overnight that happens, and maybe not people, maybe we could say you. What would you what do you think you'd rush to develop or learn right away?

Jake Hall 28:36

Oh man. Does it have to be in the industry? No. I want to learn, I'm gonna fly fish. I want to get out, I want to get out there and go fly fishing more. Like, like I don't I know it's such an offshoot, but like let me explain to you. Right now, it is I'm in Michigan in Grand Rapids, it's eight degrees outside, and I'm freezing my butt off. I need to be in a river somewhere on a stream, learning how to fly fish, and I want to have to go to a lot of events and be in the cold all the time because everyone talks automation, and then I wouldn't need to go and talk about this stuff because everyone's problems are solved in the manufacturing form, you know, and I'd I'd have to become a flyer fisherman influencer or uh or something like that. But uh there you go.

Amanda Cupido 29:23

All right. Well, I'm following you on LinkedIn, so uh I'll keep an eye out for those fly fishing uh videos, then I'll know, then I'll know it's happened.

Jake Hall 29:31

You know something's changing when I'm out there with a fly fishing rod, you know.

Amanda Cupido 29:36

All right, well, Jake, thanks for joining us. And thank you all for tuning in to People B4 Machines conversations on the chaos of factory automation powered by Eclipse. We're here to challenge the status quo in factory automation because machines don't build factories. People do. The technical producer for this podcast is Ryan Dentinger. I'm Amanda Cupido. If you got something out of today's episode, we'd love it if you share it with a teammate or a plant leader or anyone who is tired of the automation echo chamber. Be sure to follow this podcast for real talk, bold questions, and sharp insights. And remember, the future isn't fully automated, it's people powered. Talk to you soon.

Extro 30:17

Thanks for listening to People B4 Machines. Dialogues on the Chaos of Factory Automation. For past podcast episodes, search People B4 Machines on Spotify, YouTube, or visit www.peopleb4machines.com