Onboarding Amid Manufacturing Turnover

Streamlining the Onboarding Process Amidst High Manufacturing Turnover

The manufacturing industry continues to navigate a highly active and turbulent labor market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufacturing sector brought on 314,000 new hires in January 2025, with hiring remaining active at 295,000 new workers in January 2026.

However, keeping the factory floor fully staffed remains a constant battle, as the industry experienced 334,000 total separations in January 2025 and an additional 294,000 separations in January 2026. This rapid churn reflects a broader national trend; across the entire U.S. economy, there were 63.0 million total hires and 62.8 million total separations throughout 2025.

While robust hiring is necessary to maintain output—with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) reporting that 43.1% of manufacturers anticipate an increase in full-time hiring over the next year—many employers are struggling to effectively onboard these new employees. In fact, the Q1 2026 NAM Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey reveals that 44.68% of respondents cite “attracting and retaining a quality workforce” as one of their biggest current business challenges. With an average of 4.13% of manufacturing jobs expected to remain unfilled, employers are feeling the pressure to make every hire count.

Bringing on a new recruit typically involves dozens of training hours and takes months for the employee to reach full productivity. Furthermore, the average cost of adding a new employee is inherently high in manufacturing due to the extensive safety protocols and specialized training required. To attract and keep talent in this competitive environment, manufacturing employers anticipate raising employee wages by an average of 2.7% over the next 12 months.

Today’s workers are highly mobile. Quits—which are voluntary separations initiated by the employee—accounted for 60.6 percent of all labor separations in 2025. With the national number of quits remaining elevated at 3.1 million in January 2026, and small to medium-sized manufacturing firms forecasting strong employment growth averaging 1.7% over the next year, it’s more critical than ever for employers to train new individuals quickly, engage them immediately, and prevent early turnover.

Here are three ways manufacturing and logistics managers can leverage digital learning experience solutions to streamline the onboarding process and expand new hires’ skillsets:

1. Provide training materials as soon as new employees show up

When onboarding new employees in the manufacturing sector, training is an expensive necessity. Employee engagement platforms fill gaps in existing systems and make this information easier to deploy—especially to hundreds or thousands of workers spread across a massive factory floor.

Instead of requiring new employees to attend hours-long, in-person training sessions before their real shifts start, employers can use a digital workplace platform to distribute these materials directly to employees via personal mobile devices or tablets. This allows managers to step back from lecturing and focus purely on guiding and clarifying questions. Organizations can also tailor the curriculum to specific audiences based on profile qualifiers—such as those without previous warehouse experience—so that new hires don’t waste hours reviewing skills they already know. This targeted, digital approach allows new hires to be onboarded at a lower cost and with much greater efficiency.

2. Provide on-demand training videos and modules to create an agile workforce

Because visual training and physical demonstrations are inherent to the manufacturing sector, traditional training methods like paper manuals in binders are no longer sufficient. At the same time, today’s managers don’t have the bandwidth to provide in-person demonstrations for hundreds of new employees, especially across staggered shifts. Training videos allow new employees to access demonstrations on-demand through their mobile devices and to easily reference this information exactly when they need it on the floor.

Providing a digital library of videos and modules for a variety of skills also helps create a more agile workforce and combats turnover. For example, a large logistics department recently struggling with turnover due to inconsistent work hours deployed a digital workplace platform that gave employees the option to complete additional training modules on their own time. By gaining certifications to work in multiple areas—such as store recovery, forklift operation, and security—employees gained newfound agility that increased their engagement and overall retention. An agile workforce allows managers to source from within and leverage pre-existing employees who want to pick up additional hours rather than constantly relying on new hires.

3. Unify messaging and communication across all employees

A common issue among manufacturers—especially those attempting to onboard hundreds of employees in a high-turnover environment—is a fundamental lack of communication. Historically, the sector has relied on physical signage in break rooms to communicate safety standards, procedure updates, or company news. Additionally, because the schedules of certain employees and managers never overlap, workers often receive inconsistent company messaging, leading to confusion and disengagement.

While physical signage may have worked in the past, today’s manufacturing employees expect easily accessible, digital channels of communication not only with their supervisors but with their co-workers as well. With digital workplace platforms, employers can instantly broadcast targeted coaching messages, safety updates, and employee surveys that are accessible to all workers, regardless of what shift they are working or what zone of the plant they are in.

Cultivating an Agile Workforce

When it comes to onboarding at scale, training and communication are entirely co-dependent. Manufacturing employers can no longer hand a new hire a binder, subject them to countless in-person seminars, and expect them to stick around. Implementing an on-demand, digital learning experience fulfills modern employees’ expectations, accelerates time-to-productivity, streamlines task management, and cultivates an engaged workforce equipped to handle the demands of today’s fast-paced manufacturing environment.