Sam Wiley, CEO of Wiley’s Finest LLC, a manufacturer of “Made in the USA” Alaskan fish oil supplements, said the family-owned company operates its manufacturing facilities and it can be a challenge to find good people with skills for manufacturing—good mechanical aptitude, willingness to work hard and perform physical tasks, etc.

“I think Mike Rowe (of “Dirty Jobs” Discovery Channel fame) has done an incredible job promoting the idea of a skills gap among the U.S. population in his recent ‘Profoundly Disconnected’ campaign (http://profoundlydisconnected.com). Not everyone has to go to college,” Wiley said.

For the U.S. to have a thriving manufacturing economy it needs welders, mechanics, electricians, machinists and operators. “Someone has to build, run, and repair the manufacturing facility that the college-educated engineers and chemists design and build,” he added. “We certainly see it to be a distinct challenge to find these people, especially among Millennials and Gen-Xers as some of our older employees retire.”

Making ingredients isn’t always glamorous work, Wiley noted. “It can be challenging work—hot in the summer, cold in the winter working on the parts of the plant that’s outside. Cleaning out a tank or repairing a plugged line or fixing a pump—like Mike Rowe says ‘it’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it.’ Much of that hard work of ingredient manufacturing we in the U.S. have outsourced to other countries. You might have a brand that does light assembly like bottling, but actually making ingredients is hard work. It takes dedication, hard work, luck and some ingenuity to make high purity omega-3 concentrates.”

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