Increment Industrial Skills Transparency

It is estimated that 2.4M US manufacturing jobs and millions more globally will go unfilled by 2028. Manufacturers look to upskill workers effectively to fill gaps, but on-the-job trainings (OJT) aren’t well documented and are mostly offline processes currently. This leads to a lack of transparency about pathways for wage increases and factory floor role promotions.   

Increment provides a software platform to empower workers to credential their shop floor skill sets and push for wage increases through worker driven submission of skills learned, and we are piloting our live product with a manufacturer in Indiana and onboarding 2 more. 

Our vision is to empower wage workers to build skills based labor resilience so that they can build their own digital skills pathways into future in demand technology enabled industrial roles. We are starting with US manufacturing workers and will expand to hundreds of millions of industrial workers globally.

In Indiana alone where we’ve conducted our research, there are 7,000+ manufacturers and 542,000 manufacturing workers. Across the US, there are 250,000+ manufacturers and 15M+ workers, and recent initiatives to strengthen manufacturing will surely increase that number. Those manufacturers will have 2.4 million manufacturing jobs go unfilled by 2028, a problem exacerbated by a number of experienced workers retiring in the coming decade. With the pandemic creating uncertainty on the shop floor and accelerating calls for strengthening US manufacturing, the need for manufacturers to invest in upskilling and for industrial wage workers to build labor resilience has become more apparent than ever before. Manufacturers currently spend $45 billion a year on on-the-job training (OJT) but they aren't well documented and are mostly offline processes currently. This lack of transparency about pathways for wage increases and factory floor role promotions means that workers aren’t able to see their real time progress for skills based industrial learning and don’t receive as many opportunities for wage and role increases.

Our solution’s first release currently provides a mobile and desktop accessible web platform to empower workers to credential their shop floor skill sets and push for wage increases. The solution currently has several components: 

1. Workers see all potential skills to learn and the upskilling pathways that lead to the next wage level 

2. Workers then can drive skill submission for an internal credential that they’ve learned by inputting details about a skill they’ve learned

3. Workers can see a history of credentialed skills that they’ve worked to learn and that their supervisors have approved

4. Supervisors can tailor individual upskilling needs more effectively, creating a more robust internal pipeline of workers to fill skills gap needs   

Once this foundation of real time skills is built, we can then utilize further technologies such as machine learning to truly understand how skills in industrial sectors such as manufacturing are evolving with technological changes, and we can better adapt and introduce content and training to fit those needs. Increment aims to expand our abilities to surface under the radar workers and create features such as a recommendation engine to deliver targeted training materials.

We seek to directly impact low income, vulnerable populations, especially minority immigrant industrial workers and women in manufacturing. After hundreds of in depth interviews with manufacturing workers, community, and economic organizations, we have developed a strong sense of understanding the environment that industrial wage workers operate in and the challenges that they face outside the factory floor. We have co-developed our solution in close conjunction with them this year and have continuously engaged their feedback with weekly remote demos of our platform in the past few months. Many of the pain points we address with regards to making upskilling pathways transparent and empowering them to submit their skill learnings came directly from worker input. 

We have talked to many different types of manufacturers during our research phase, and manufacturers such as General Motors are affected by not being able to fully hire for their needs and employ the target population that Increment serves. Their commitment to sponsoring this challenge shows the mindset of wanting to upskill workers effectively to prepare for advanced manufacturing. Increment empowers workers to be engaged in transparent upskilling pathways and to push for wage increases, which will support socioeconomic mobility and fulfilling, technology enabled industrial careers.   

We provide a software-driven solution that makes the industrial upskilling process significantly more transparent for the industrial worker because we’ve found that the ways in which the skills are taught are documented are mostly offline or not well documented at all. The manufacturers we’ve interviewed have shown us spreadsheets, paper checklists, or “hacky” systems they attempted to build using non-intuitive Visual Basic interfaces. This is where we then saw an ability for us to apply an innovative solution to build around their current upskilling tracking behavior. By starting with digitizing these processes through an intuitive web-based platform that’s worker enabled and accessible from factory floor or home computers as well as mobile phones, workers can access their progress at any time and see what needs to be done instead of just relying on their supervisors to document their skills learned. The current solutions show that manufacturers are looking to cross train their workers, and one of our pilot manufacturers have called it a “Godsend.”

We’ve built the first release of our platform to be a web enabled desktop and mobile friendly software solution that’s easy to integrate and use for manufacturing shop floor floors, supervisors, and trainers. The software will allow for real time progress updates and notifications and allow workers to receive custom skills feedback when necessary. We will be adding machine learning capabilities to our growing data-driven foundation of manufacturing skills learned in real time, and this is something that does not exist yet at scale for analyzing and predicting industrial skill sets in real time. 

We have a signed pilot manufacturer in South Bend, Indiana as well as two other manufacturers nearby that we are onboarding. We conducted our foundational research in Indiana and Michigan and then co-developed our platform with local manufacturing stakeholders by asking shop floor workers what they wanted to see as well as delving into manufacturers’ currently offline training processes.

Product demo walkthrough: https://youtu.be/3-Lvc97VRPo

We approached the topic from an open-ended research basis and evolved it into developing intuitive solutions that fit the needs of industrial wage workers. 

From our review of third party research on technology’s impact on manufacturer labor by the Brookings Institution, New America, Deloitte, McKinsey, and others, we gained an understanding of some of the research landscape, which will also inform our longer term research work to contribute our findings from working with manufacturers. 

From our interviews with 300 stakeholders across local manufacturing, community, economic, and workforce organizations, we gained a deep understanding of the day to day manufacturing environment, industrial culture nuances, and the initiatives led by states and regions on a community level to support industrial technological and workforce changes.  

From our codevelopment period of working with manufacturers to dig into the details of their current OJT processes, we worked with operations, quality, and training directors to talk through spreadsheets, paper checklists, and any other methods they used to document skill sets. We learned the workers’ and supervisors’ actual current behavior and began to develop software iterations around those learnings to streamline the process and show internal skill pathway development in real time.

Our solution has the following goals:  

1. We currently serve 150 manufacturing workers, and in a year, we will be serving 3600 workers across 12 manufacturers. In five years, we look to serve 100,000 manufacturing workers and their families in the US and globally. 

2. Local community, workforce, and economic organizations are key, and we have developed partnerships with 16 in Indiana and Michigan so far. We look to create a nationwide network that will be utilized in conjunction with each manufacturing pilot to support the worker outside of their work and in their communities. 

1. Internal skills credentialing: By the end of this year, we look to have 300,000 skills submitted by manufacturing workers and approved by supervisors and 15,000 wage and role reviews completed successfully. In 5 years, we will have 7 million skills submitted and internally credentialled as well as 3.5M million wage and role reviews completed successfully

2. Product: Add additional features as requested by workers and manufacturers as well as machine learning to surface under the radar workers who have been upskilled and build out a training recommendation engine to deliver specific upskilling content. 

1. Partnerships: We will continue to form partnerships with large scale economic and workforce organizations such as the $40M Labs for Industry Futures and Transformation (LIFT) initiative funded by the Eli Lilly Foundation to build manufacturing and workforce resilience in northern Indiana. 

We will be raising further funding this Fall from impact investors and organizations so that we can ramp up our operations as well as be powered by revenue from manufacturers.  

We look to hire individuals who are both strong technically or show that potential as well as have thoughtfully explored topics such as the ethics of technology’s impact on rural parts of the globe. We’ve found that this combination is typically not as common as we’d like in general technology circles.  

Traditionally, the manufacturing mindset is stereotypically known to be “old-school” at times, but that has definitely been changing in the past decade, with articles in the WSJ written about manufacturing culture changes as well as case studies of manufacturers implementing innovative production and workforce solutions.

We have been developing relationships with impact investors who specialize in our topic and are looking to participate in the new Techstars Workforce Development accelerator happening in late 2020.  

We have also been accepted into the third cohort of the Aspen Institute’s Tech Policy Hub as one of 15 participants, so that would be an excellent community to hire from as it consists of strong technologists, engineers, and designers who are highly impact oriented and think about themes that Increment is built around, such as technology’s impact on rural regions, socioeconomic mobility, and the future of industrial work.  

We currently have 1 full time employee, 1 contractor, and 2 part time staff. We look to ramp up our team significantly later this year as we have proved out our platform and seek to onboard other manufacturers.

We have a diverse mix of a now strong understanding of the manufacturing ecosystem and culture, a well developed software product development background trained at some of the top technology companies in Silicon Valley (e.g. Stripe), as well as the industrial Midwest know-how of the impact of technology on more rural parts of the US. We aim to bridge the gap between the urban and rural regions around the US and world, and we believe that rigorously approaching the complexity of this topic and thoughtfully building out tooling will allow us to combine the disparate worlds that we interface with.

We are proud to be supported by and partner with the Aspen Institute’s Tech Policy Hub, a high caliber community that accepted us into their 3rd cohort of 15 technologists and engineers to explore the policy and impact side of our work further.  

We have also partnered with 16 local workforce, economic and community organizations in Indiana and Michigan so far, including a new $40M initiative led by the Eli Lilly Foundation and the University of Notre Dame to build manufacturing and workforce resilience. We will become an EIR company for them as we further flesh out our collaborations, and our findings and data from working with manufacturers will help inform. Additionally, we are working with the NextLevel state program by Indiana to help manufacturers obtain $50k training grants.    

We sell our first product, Increment’s Upskilling Tracking Tool, directly to manufacturers, on a yearly contract basis. This model has been determined based on pricing and contract discussions with manufacturers so far. Each manufacturer will undergo a 2 month paid pilot where Increment will onboard their shop floor workers, provide support to answer questions and walk through how to use the platform, and obtain feedback about what features to add. After the 2 month pilot period, we will then sign a yearly contract. We know that manufacturers want this because this is the process that they have asked us to complete after showing strong interest in Increment’s platform and it solves their pain points of digitizing their OJT skills documentation processes to understand their workforce skill sets and cross training.  

We will be financially sustainable based on revenue from our manufacturing customers and will grow at the same rate that we onboard new manufacturers. Each yearly contract will average around $30,000/year, and we will reach nearly $1M ARR through onboarding 30 manufacturers. We will then be able to grow as appropriate from there. 

We have not been very public facing so far as we have worked with manufacturing workers and companies directly so far. We would like guidance around publicizing and publishing our work further and the right channels to push that through. Solve aligns with our values of being strongly impact driven, and we aim to build a successful social impact company around building labor resilience for industrial wage workers. Additionally, the Solve community will allow us to accelerate connecting with the investors that are aligned with our vision as well as meet those who would be interested in joining Increment’s team in the near future.

We believe that being a part of the MIT Solve ecosystem would greatly accelerate our goals for funding, advisors, talent recruitment, and media coverage to publicize our work further. We know that any potential team members and advisors to join Increment would already be aligned with our values. The interdisciplinary nature leads to a diverse set of thoughts that will influence Increment to think critically about product decisions, worker engagement, and research.  

We recently attended the Jobs for the Future Horizons conference, and there were two MIT professors and lecturers who spoke about the new social contract for workers and society. They were Barbara Dyer, the Executive Director of the Good Companies, Good Jobs initiative at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Thomas Kochan, a Professor of Employment Research and the Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. We’ve also learned about the Initiative for the Digital Economy which is strongly aligned with our work.    

Additionally, we are very interested in the Initiative for the Digital Economy, and the work done around AI, Automation and Work by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. We would like to flesh out the research side of Increment, and we are developing a database of real time industrial skills by working with manufacturers directly which isn’t readily accessible today in a standardized way. We would like to collaborate with the MIT organizations and researchers mentioned above by contributing our data and meaningfully collaborate to have them contribute their perspectives to Increment’s impact goals.

We are focused on building labor resilience for manufacturing wage workers by streamlining the currently offline processes for tracking industrial upskilling pathways. This critical change will enable the upskilling process and options to become significantly more transparent as the worker, supervisor, and trainer stakeholders all have a real time understanding skills progress. As a result, skills progression will happen at a more frequent pace, which will lead to more wage increases and accelerated preparation for “Industry 4.0” and advanced manufacturing. GM would potentially be a great fit for a partner to continue to develop our skills tracking platform targeted at industrial workers.

With trends such as “Industry 4.0” in manufacturing signaling a new technology-driven era and the need for skill sets that are increasingly in demand, it is necessary to have an incremental shift in learning processes. Manufacturers often tell us that some of their potential hires and shop floor workers have trouble passing fraction and decimal math tests, which is an important skill for making precise components and requires learning and documenting progress over time. Additionally, skills such as those required by machine programming, maintenance technician, and machining are going to be more needed than ever while some of the previously repetitive and dangerous work in manufacturing may be greatly reduced over the next few decades. Increment aims to facilitate those changes by partnering with workers and stakeholders to build the right upskilling tracking tooling.