Fluke: Skills Shortages Cause 78% of Manufacturing Obstacles

Skills shortages present the biggest obstacle to manufacturers' digital maturity, according to Fluke Corporation.

Data from its survey also showed an increase in uptakes of predictive maintenance software. 

McKinsey says that as AI transformations accelerate, the gap between the skills that workforces possess and the skills they will need is widening faster than organisations’ ability to adapt.

Majority of all reported obstacles

Fluke says the data shows a growing disconnect between technology adoption and workforce readiness. 

The results show skills-related challenges accounting for approximately 78% of all reported obstacles, including lack of expertise, knowledge shortages and skilled labour gaps.

Parker Burke, Group President at Fluke Corporation, says: “Our findings show that reliability and workforce skills are now the critical factors in converting technology spend into measurable operational improvement. 

“We need a solution to the skills shortage to supplement technology investment for the best results.”

The manufacturing skills gap

A McKinsey report says that advanced industrial manufacturers around the globe continue to be challenged by workforce and labour woes that are uprooting the industry’s long-relied-upon norms of consistent labour supply and certain skill level expectations.

A study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI) found that manufacturers will need to hire as many as 3.8 million workers by 2033. The study suggested that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled due to skills gaps.

With lack of expertise and knowledge shortages accounting for key issues faced by companies according to the data from Fluke, many manufacturers are looking for ways to address these skills shortages in manufacturing. 

Training efforts in the US

Workforce training is widely understood as the most effective method to deal with the skills gap. 

Google recently announced US$10m in funding for the MI to assist the US workforce in what Google calls 'a new era of industrial innovation', which is in an initiative geared towards addressing the gap between technological innovations and workforce readiness. 

The funding is designed to equip 40,000 current and future manufacturing employees with AI skills.

Wider efforts to ramp up training efforts are continuing according to the latest data in the MI’s State of Workforce Training in Manufacturing report, released in April of 2026, which found that 54.4% of firms were increasing current workforce training efforts.

Predictive maintenance doubles

Fluke’s survey, conducted by Censuswide, surveyed more than 600 senior decision-makers and maintenance professionals in the US, the UK and Germany across Food and Beverage, Oil and Gas, Life Sciences and Automotive industries.

The data showed that adoption of predictive maintenance doubled from 9% to 16%. 

Vineet Thuvara, Chief Product Officer at Fluke Corporation, says: “The progress is encouraging, but it’s not enough yet. 

“Predictive maintenance is no longer a future ambition: it is the baseline. Manufacturers next challenge is scaling adoption and integrating it across the organisation, ensuring these capabilities work in harmony across the organisation, not in isolation.”

Other key findings from Fluke

Fluke’s data also showed that 72% of organisations now allocate 16 to 30% of their maintenance budgets to new technologies, with investment moving away from exploratory AI, which was 44% of maintenance budgets in 2024. 

Instead, the budgets are geared toward operational priorities including cybersecurity, data management and both generative and industrial AI. 

The data also showed that 49% of respondents plan to advance connected reliability initiatives within the next 12 months.