Writing for the Washington Post today, Neil Irwin discusses a report released today by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Irwin writes:

Manufacturing contributed 20 percent of the growth in global economic output from 1995 to 2005, the McKinsey researchers estimate, and 37 percent of global productivity growth. Yet the sector actually subtracted 24 percent from worldwide employment.

Irwin goes on to explain that manufacturing jobs now are not what they used to be. Fewer jobs entail working on an assembly line, as robots and other kinds of machines are now capable of doing that work. However, opportunities exist for engineers, sales people and designers – the kinds of jobs that will not ever be performed by machines.

In other words, manufacturing as a sector is doing well, and there’s still a lot of hope for manufacturing jobs, however, those jobs are very specific and require a skill-set not often considered as manufacturing-oriented.

Read more here.