New survey data reveals a gap for manufacturers. By Lindsay Lawson
Reshoring has moved from strategic ambition to active execution across US manufacturing. The operational capability to deliver on that shift is trailing behind. One of the biggest reasons sits on the production floor, not in the boardroom.
A survey of 250 manufacturing decision-makers at US companies with more than 1000 employees, commissioned by BigRep and conducted by Atomik Research in March 2026, found that 79 percent have already brought production back in-house or are actively in the process. Only eight percent haven’t yet evaluated it. The direction is set.
What isn’t set is the workforce. Among manufacturers who haven’t yet fully transitioned, 22 percent cited a lack of skilled staff to operate new equipment as a primary barrier. That figure sits alongside two others of the same weight: cost of equipment (25 percent) and integration time (22 percent).
Money isn’t the constraint. Seventy-three percent of respondents reported that their capital equipment budget had increased from last year. Checks are being written. What’s missing is the workforce to run what those checks are buying.
The problem isn’t new. Reshoring is just exposing it
The skills shortage in US manufacturing has been building for over a decade. Offshore production masked the problem. When your components come from a supplier in Vietnam or Mexico, the operators running those production lines are somebody else’s workforce problem.
Bringing production home means inheriting that problem directly. The manufacturer who reshores a component now needs the machinists, technicians, and operators to actually run the reshored production. Those people don’t appear on the same timeline the equipment does.
Ninety-two percent of respondents reported disruption from tariff and trade policy shifts in the last year. Thirty-six percent said policy changes had prompted them to revise their reliance on externally sourced components. The pressure to move fast is real. The workforce to receive that shift is not showing up at the same speed.
What operations leaders should think about differently
The default response to a skills shortage is to hire your way out of it, and most manufacturers try that first. In a market where every regional manufacturer is chasing the same qualified operators, that approach hits its ceiling quickly. Two other levers work harder right now.
The first is capability distribution. Not every reshored production line needs the same level of skilled labor. Some processes are inherently high skill: precision CNC work, complex welding, and quality inspection on regulated parts. Others can be run by less specialized operators. Sorting production work into those two categories and matching each to the appropriate workforce strategy buys time that a blanket hiring push doesn’t.
This is where flexible production technologies earn attention. Large-format additive manufacturing, for example, handles work that would traditionally require highly skilled toolmakers or machinists, such as jigs, fixtures, custom tooling, and low-volume end-use parts.
An operator running an industrial 3D printer needs training, but not the same decade of trade experience a journeyman machinist takes to develop. Redirecting some of that work to technologies that require less scarce labor is a legitimate short-term play for manufacturers under reshoring pressure.
At BigRep, we’re seeing US manufacturers deploy large-format additive systems specifically for this reason: they get in-house production capacity up and running without waiting on a hire that may take 12 to 18 months to land.
The second lever is training tied to specific reshored capacity, not treated as a generic pipeline. Apprenticeship programs, technical college partnerships, and internal cross-training all take time to mature, but those that deliver results fastest align to specific production lines the company knows it’s bringing home. Training six operators for the equipment you’re installing in nine months is a solvable problem. Building a generic manufacturing workforce in the abstract is not.
The workforce is the real timeline
The gap the survey exposes isn’t going to close on its own. The manufacturers who close it will be the ones who treat the workforce constraint as a design problem, not just a hiring problem.
Be honest about which reshored work needs scarce skilled labor, and which doesn’t. Match production technologies to the workforce that exists regionally, not the workforce you’d have in an ideal market. Tie training investment to the reshored capacity being built on the same timeline as the equipment.
The strategic decision to bring production home has been made. Whether it succeeds or stalls depends on how quickly manufacturers solve the workforce problem sitting underneath it.
Lindsay Lawson
www.bigrep.com
Lindsay Lawson is Head of Product Marketing at BigRep. BigRep designs and manufactures large-format industrial 3D printing systems used by Fortune 100 companies and engineering teams to bring reshored production, tooling, and end-use part manufacturing in-house.
With a growing US customer base across automotive, aerospace, defense, and industrial manufacturing, BigRep works with operations leaders to close the gap between reshoring intent and reshoring execution through flexible, workforce-scalable additive manufacturing
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