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A friend of mine runs a commercial printing company. He took me into his production room yesterday. It is the size of a car mechanic’s workshop, humming with machinery, peoples bustling everywhere, piles of printing on every surface. Situated in the heart of London and with a small dedicated team of workers it is hardly the image that comes to mind when we speak of factories or manufacturing. But it is a factory and that’s what makes it important.

As we come out of recession, and wave goodbye to an economy underpinned by the financial sector, economists and politicians are weighing up how growth will be powered in the future. And all the smart money is on manufacturing.

Although it is only a few short years since UK factories were closing and manufactured goods were being sourced from the Far East, it is beginning to feel like a lifetime ago. The high cost of transporting goods from the other side of the world, together with the low pound which makes our exports competitive are fuelling a manufacturing boom the like of which we have not seen for decades.1,200 Industrial jobs were gained last week and 700 the week before. We are used to seeing job losses, not job gains, in the Industrial sector.

But if manufacturing is going through a renaissance, it will not look in the future like it did in the past. It is unlikely that there will be a rash of giant new factories opening, with large, unionised workforces. We have moved on from that. We are far less class conscious than in the past and we all want jobs that we care about and that we believe in. The future of manufacturing will almost certainly lie in small workshops and tight, committed workforces all pulling together. It is an encouraging thought. I saw the future yesterday.

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Tags: Factories, Manufacturing, Printing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 6:52 am and is filed under Career Planning . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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