Labor and Employment

Manufacturers have long sourced great talent from the military community, helping transitioning and former military members apply their skills to America’s most pressing manufacturing challenges.

Through the Manufacturing Readiness Project, the Manufacturing Institute, the workforce development and education affiliate of the NAM, is making it even easier for military veterans to find excellent civilian careers—and for manufacturers to build an outstanding and talented workforce.

The project: The Manufacturing Readiness Project aims to make military experience comprehensible to civilian employers via a digital credentialing system.

• Military servicemembers are awarded digital badges—stored in digital wallets—based on their military occupation and the training they received, giving both them and future employers a clear way to understand how their military experience prepared them for a job and a career in manufacturing.

The details: The badges include a range of certifications in areas like general safety, general quality and general maintenance.

• Each badge includes a number of additional micro-badges signifying levels and types of achievement. General safety, for example, includes micro-badges in fields like workplace safety, environmental inspections and emergency response.
• These badges are also aligned with more than 300 military occupation codes across all five branches of the military, thereby translating military experience into terms that civilian employers will recognize.

What it means: For the MI, this project represents a critical opportunity to expand the military-to-manufacturing pipeline.

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