Want to strengthen America's economy? The key investment is hiding in plain sight

Picture the morning your technicians don’t show up. Your flight never leaves the gate because there is no one to solve the maintenance issue. Your car sits in the shop for three weeks because the service bay has a lift and the necessary tools, but no one is there to utilize any of it. A factory line goes down and stays down. The trucks behind it don’t roll, the supply chain stalls, the packages never arrive. A data center overheats. A fire truck won’t start.

None of that is hypothetical. It’s the direction we’re heading. The U.S. economy faces a massive shortage of skilled technical talent. Across 10 critical sectors (like automotive, aviation and HVAC), industry supply meets barely 42% of the total demand. This tech shortage drains $7.42 billion in wage-based economic output from the U.S. economy every single year.

What makes this shortage so puzzling is that America is talking about the skilled trades.

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Skilled technicians are exactly the high-skill, high-wage, in-demand jobs Americans increasingly say they want, and that employers, policymakers and philanthropists increasingly say they want to support. Most open jobs start at $50,000 to $80,000, require no four-year degree and pay at or above the national median. The top techs can clear six figures. A modern vehicle is a computer on wheels. A modern aircraft is a data center with wings.

Employers have started responding. Ford, Carrier and Snap-on have invested in scholarships, grants and workforce training to help build the next generation of technicians. This year alone, employers and foundations have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to the skilled trades, which is welcome, overdue news.

So, if interest and investment in the skilled trades are rising, why is the technician shortage still so severe?

Part of the answer is surprisingly basic: We don't actually see technicians as a workforce.

When people think of skilled labor, they often think of construction workers or plumbers. (Spoiler alert: So do the government and funders.) A "technician" is an automotive, diesel and aircraft tech; a collision and ADAS calibration specialist; an HVAC tech keeping both your home and a hyperscale data center from overheating; an industrial machinery mechanic keeping the robots running; a wind and solar tech keeping the grid alive.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts close to 6 million in its maintenance-and-repair workforce — and that leaves out welders and excludes the self-employed entirely. Independent shops handle most of the nation’s vehicle repairs, and at TechForce, owning a shop is the dream for roughly seven in 10 of the thousands of technicians we serve.

When you account for the full ecosystem — from automotive and aviation to HVAC, industrial machinery, energy and beyond — America’s technician workforce is roughly 7 million strong, collectively earning more than $375 billion a year. Yet the size and economic power of that workforce is obscured by the way our labor data categorizes it.

Instead, they're scattered across dozens of occupational codes, making one of America's largest essential workforces effectively invisible. Viewed separately, their shortages can look like isolated problems facing individual industries.

Taken together, they reveal something much bigger: an economy-wide shortage of the technicians who keep America running. And money follows the data. The attention and investment flow toward the trades the system can see, while an enormous swath of the skilled workforce remains fragmented across categories.

Follow that to the bottom line. Americans will spend $435 billion this year just maintaining and repairing their vehicles. Airlines spend roughly $120 billion a year keeping aircraft airworthy. Ford CEO Jim Farley calls blue-collar work the "essential economy" and warns we aren’t building the workforce to sustain it, describing the shortage as "a bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it."

And lately it’s become bigger than any balance sheet. As the country reshores manufacturing, powers AI data centers that can’t be allowed to overheat and rebuilds its defense base, the people who keep those systems running are a strategic asset. Carolyn Lee, president of the Manufacturing Institute, warns that the coming shortfall of 1.9 million manufacturing workers by 2033 is "not just a workforce issue — it’s an economic and national security issue."

America cannot invest trillions in new physical and technological infrastructure without investing in the human infrastructure required to maintain it. And doing that starts with making this workforce visible. We need the Bureau of Labor Statistics to stop fragmenting these jobs under dozens of separate codes, so policymakers and funders can see the true size, demand and economic value of the full technician workforce.

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Then we need to build pathways that match the demand. Workforce dollars, scholarships, apprenticeships and career-and-technical education should reach roles like automotive, HVAC and industrial machinery technicians, not just the handful of skilled trades Americans already know by name. At TechForce, we see firsthand what happens when those pathways exist: students are eager to enter these careers, but demand for support far outpaces the resources available to help them get there.

And companies investing billions in manufacturing, AI, energy, transportation and defense should treat the technician pipeline as part of that investment. New factories, data centers, fleets and advanced machines are only as valuable as our ability to keep them running.

Technicians are the hidden force behind America's economy and investing in them is one of the most strategic ways to strengthen communities, rebuild the middle class and secure the country's future.

America spends an immense amount of energy searching for the next breakthrough technology, but technologies don't maintain themselves. Every plane, server, wind turbine, factory robot, hospital MRI machine and delivery truck eventually needs someone who knows how to keep it working. Every major investment America is making has a technician workforce behind it.

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Maybe the highest-return investment is in the people who keep every machine moving.

The next time your car starts, your flight lands, or your lights stay on through a heat wave — thank a tech. Better yet, help us build the next one.