Time to Toot Our Own Horns

Found this link on Forbes.com today. The Wise Men have spoken. Manufacturing jobs are expected to decline by more than 5% by 2014, qualifying manufacturing (again!) for top of the heap in the Worst Jobs of the Future contest. Well, I would never presume to argue with my betters from a place like Forbes, and they're only quoting government numbers anyway. But that number isn't the whole story. (And I wonder why manufacturing got mentioned first, when file clerks and manual photo processor jobs will decline by 36% and 30% respectively. Have those of us with connection to factories done something to tick off the money men?) But I digress. Here's the point. The fact that 5% of manufacturing jobs are going away doesn't tell the whole story -- at least not for automation professionals. While jobs in traditional manufacturing may diusappearing, what about the coming boom in bio-fuels?  Gonna need a few process engineers there, I think.  What about nanotechnology? Machine-to-machine technology?And even the Forbes writer recognizes that a hot field is cyber security -- as if nobody in manufacturing needs to think about that. We know that there are good opportunities to be had in process manufacturing in the future, but "Popular Wisdom" continues to preach that manufacturing is not only dirty, dark and dangerous, but doomed. We need to get our story out. Who wants to write to Forbes or the Wall Street Journal and 'splain to them that a lot more is going on in manufacturing than shows up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports? Which of you from a major company (with full-time p.r. folks) wants to assign one of them the job of getting your CEO on a popular business news show to tell the world about some of the opportunities in manufacturing, or get the personal opinion gig for an issue of one of the major news magazines to tell the same story in print? The thing about the news is that stories told over and over again become the truth, whether they really are or not.  Somebody has to tell the other side of the story or it really will disappear.