🔒CT looks to major ad campaign to recruit manufacturing workers

Gov. Ned Lamont recently announced the state will spend $8.3 million on a slate of programs aimed at bolstering Connecticut’s manufacturing sector, including an advertising campaign to highlight the industry’s career opportunities.

The state has spent the past decade building up manufacturing training programs through community colleges and partnerships with private entities, said Colin Cooper, Connecticut’s Chief Manufacturing Officer. Now it’s time to promote these programs and get more people in the pipeline to help attack the industry’s workforce shortage.

“What we need to do is drive more volume,” Cooper said. “We need more candidates going into those programs, completing them, then going into the manufacturing workforce.”

Local marketing executives say an ad campaign could help get more people interested in the manufacturing industry. They say a successful effort should use a mix of traditional and new media that highlights training programs and their job placement prospects, higher-than-average salaries and use language that cultivates a “cool factor” for the industry.

“I think we have to celebrate these manufacturing jobs and change the language around them,” said Eric Cavoli, creative director at Glastonbury-based ad firm CashmanKatz. “They’re tech jobs, they’re maker and creator jobs. … Manufacturing is cooler than it’s ever been.”

‘Hearts-and-minds campaign’

Now is a good time to launch an advertising campaign because the state has a solid manufacturing training infrastructure it’s built over the past decade, Cooper said. Ten of Connecticut’s 12 community colleges have advanced manufacturing centers, and the state has forged relationships with private schools like Goodwin University that offer manufacturing industry courses.

With these programs in place, the main challenge is filling them with enough students. Cooper said the state needs to add between 6,000 and 8,000 new manufacturing workers each year for the foreseeable future to properly staff the industry. Right now the state’s only producing about half that amount, he said.

Cooper said the ad campaign should take a two-pronged approach: encourage people to enter specific training programs with a pipeline to employment, and promote manufacturing careers as an exciting opportunity rather than a dead end.

“Our goal isn’t just to drive demand for these training programs, but it’s also… a hearts-and-minds campaign,” Cooper said. “We have to change the perception that a student beginning their manufacturing career means the end of their education career.”

This won’t be the first time the state launches a manufacturing industry marketing campaign. In 2016, the state spent $700,000 for its “Make it. Here.,” campaign as part of an effort to expand manufacturing training programs at the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, said Michelle Hall, who was a project manager at CSCU at the time and oversaw the project, which was funded with a $15 million federal grant.

The “Make it. Here.” tagline — which encouraged people to “make it” in life, while making products “here” in Connecticut — targeted people in their mid-20s to mid-30s and was featured in TV commercials, billboards and on social media, Hall said. Additionally, the state Department of Labor agreed to include “Make it. Here.” ads in emails periodically sent to individuals receiving unemployment benefits.

“It wasn’t sexy, it was very targeted to the populations we were interested in,” Hall said.

Hall, who is currently a project manager for the state Department of Economic and Community Development, said she doesn’t have specific data on the 2016 campaign’s effectiveness, but some students did say they enrolled in certain classes featured in the ads.

“We knew that they were coming in because of the marketing campaign because they’d tell us,” Hall said.

Diverse audience

A big focus for the previous ad blitz was that manufacturing offered not just a job, but a better job, said Elkinson + Sloves President Jay Sloves, who worked on that campaign. The advertising push the state wants to launch now should keep up that message, but also promote the “cool factor” of working on jet engines, submarines and other exciting products, Sloves said.

Social media and TV advertisements would both be important pieces of such a campaign, as would billboards, which do a lot to reinforce messages people hear and see via other media, Sloves said.

An ad campaign that specifically targets women could show particularly strong results, Sloves added, as the manufacturing industry is heavily male. Women represent just about 30% of the 15.8 million people working in the manufacturing industry nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

“The state could actually double their market pool if they targeted women,” Sloves said.

Sara-Beth Donovan — president of Media Only, a business unit of Avon-based ad firm Mintz + Hoke — said anyone advertising manufacturing career opportunities in Connecticut should also include Spanish language content.

For a recent social media campaign Donovan oversaw that promoted a manufacturing company looking to hire, she found Spanish language content on Facebook garnered more engagement than English-language ads.

“We know that our state is very diverse and it’s myopic to just put out English-language messaging if you want to reach the broadest audience,” Donovan said.

Donovan also agrees ads on traditional media like TV and billboards are still powerful in reaching wide audiences. Advertising during televised sporting events, for example, is a pretty standard move that remains effective.

The state should change some terminology used for manufacturing jobs, said Cavoli of CashmanKatz.

Focusing on how manufacturing jobs involve creating things and working with your hands could go a long way, Cavoli said.

The cultural environment is ripe for this kind of message right now, Cavoli said, citing the growth of independent retailer platforms like Etsy and social media celebrities that produce do-it-yourself home improvement content. Additionally, Cavoli said, people are now more skeptical of the job placement value of four-year degrees, which creates an opening for non-college job training opportunities.

Cooper said he’s also reaching out to manufacturing companies to encourage them to shift their expectations for prospective employees. Most of Connecticut’s approximately 4,000 manufacturing companies are small operations that lack the resources to do much professional development training. Because of that, many of these companies are seeking experienced professionals.

“They want somebody to come in who’s highly-skilled, mid-career, but they don’t want to pay the market price for what that talent costs,” Cooper said. “They need to be willing to take on less-skilled, early-career people.”