Why Workforce Resilience Is Critical to Manufacturing Supply Chain Resilience
Resilience has been positioned largely as a Supply Chain Problem. However, it’s also a Workforce Issue.
Resilience has become one of the most talked-about priorities across industries. Companies aiming to implement and build resilient operations often focus on familiar levers: flexibility, redundancy, and stronger communication across their supplier base. These are critical foundations. Supplier diversification, alternate sourcing strategies, and clearer escalation pathways all help organizations withstand disruption and remain pliable during the unexpected.
But resilience cannot stop at the enterprise boundary, or even at the supplier boundary.
One of the fastest-growing and most strategically important sectors right now is manufacturing. According to research from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, “manufacturing is expected to see 3.8 million new jobs open by 2033. Yet nearly half of those roles are projected to go unfilled.” At first glance, you may think this is an issue stemming from a lack of opportunity but it’s a lack of alignment. Potential workforce alignment to be exact.
Only 14% of Gen Z say they would consider industrial or manufacturing work as a career. This represents a structural risk that traditional resilience planning rarely considers.
When companies discuss resilience, they often frame it around maintaining operations, cost control, and speed of recovery. What’s missing is an equally rigorous focus on workforce resilience, both internally and across the supplier ecosystem. A supply chain is only as resilient as the people who operate it and I believe businesses often forget that.
From a supplier relationship management perspective, this is crucial. Many manufacturers rely on extended supplier networks facing the same labor constraints, demographic shifts, and perception challenges. If suppliers cannot attract or retain talent, lead times slip, quality degrades, and contingency plans fail, regardless of how well contracts are written. This often leads to higher pricing from the suppliers since their operations expenditures increase in an effort to maintain what talent they do have, and extend resources to attract new ones.
Research from Soter Analytics highlights a key disconnect:
One in four Gen Z workers believe manufacturing lacks flexibility and isn’t safe. These are two non-negotiables for a generation that prioritizes well-being, flexibility, autonomy, and feeling cared for at work.
Ignoring these perceptions certainly creates a hiring problem (we noticed this trend during the height of COVID and a push for remote work). However, it also creates an issue with business resilience.
True resilience requires companies to expand how they define risk and preparedness. When it comes to supplier relationship maintenance and management, that means:
Evaluating suppliers not only on cost, capacity, and compliance, but also on workforce stability and labor practices.
Building supplier partnerships that support safer environments (diversity, equity, and inclusion are big factors here), realistic scheduling, and transparent communication.
Recognizing that talent attraction and retention are shared risks across the value chain and are not isolated as HR ONLY issues.
If businesses want to remain adaptable in today’s market, resilience must be viewed as a system-level capability, meaning it’s one that integrates suppliers, processes, and people. Our motto is “Aligning People, Process, and Partners” so this makes sense to us.
To the Biopharmaceuticals and Biotech companies out there: addressing workforce expectations, particularly those of the next generation, is no longer optional. It is a prerequisite for long-term operational resilience. You cannot build a resilient supply chain on an exhausted, disengaged, or absent workforce, no matter how robust the strategy is presented and appears to be on paper.
Source:
https://fortune.com/2025/12/04/gen-z-4-million-new-manufacturing-jobs-america-boomer-retire-one-trade-job-young-people-dont-want/?mkt_tok=MDYzLUZJTy0yNTUAAAGeo00bg2rr7ke6idnekEvsPHP0sO2au3gllfrBufSxbVbqHuk-OL7NX3JJKDlN5OTobk8TYUKyJdiivqEer0mK0gMjlNNfaR_68Rs2Nfc7BNpjwPU
About Us
The Biokive Consultancy Group is a boutique consultancy firm that helps life sciences companies drive sustainable growth by strengthening the health of their supplier relationships. We support organizations across supplier identification, selection, general maintenance, and both short and long/term supplier management.
To learn more, contact us at info@biokive.com, visit www.thebiokive.com, or schedule a complimentary discovery call at www.thebiokive.com/appointments to explore whether a collaboration is the right fit.