Andy Nicholas, WorkJam

The manufacturing industry continues to navigate a highly active and turbulent labour market. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, job vacancies across Australia have remained elevated in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of roles unfilled – including persistent shortages across manufacturing and logistics.

However, keeping the factory floor fully staffed remains a constant challenge, as employers contend with ongoing labour mobility and competition for skilled workers. This reflects a broader national trend, with workforce churn remaining elevated across frontline and shift-based industries.

While robust hiring is necessary to maintain output – with industry bodies such as the Australian Industry Group reporting that more than half of manufacturers are struggling to find suitably skilled workers – many employers are struggling to effectively onboard these new employees.

At the same time, the National Skills Commission continues to highlight persistent shortages in key technical and operational roles critical to manufacturing. With vacancies remaining elevated and skills gaps ongoing, employers are feeling increasing 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 particularly high in manufacturing due to the extensive safety protocols and specialized training required. To attract and keep talent in this competitive environment, Australian employers are also navigating steady wage growth, with increases tracking at approximately 3.5 to 4 percent annually in recent periods.

Today’s workers are highly mobile. While Australia does not track “quit rates” in the same way as the United States, labour mobility remains elevated, particularly across frontline and operational roles. Employees are increasingly willing to change roles for better pay, flexibility, or development opportunities. This makes it 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 frontline operations 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.

It also means the information flow becomes more transactional – new hires can ask questions, flag confusion, and feel heard from their first shift, rather than just receive content and be expected to absorb it.

Organisations 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 the operational flexibility to work across departments, which drove both engagement and 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. Again, this becomes a valuable two-way transaction of thoughts and ideas, across multiple channels such as peer recognition, anonymous feedback and surfacing of safety issues.

With frontline operation platforms, employees have a direct line to their chain of command, and 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. The cost of staying manual is now measurable and significant: lost productivity, inconsistent training, and early attrition all compound quickly.

Manufacturers that move to digital frontline operations cut time-to-productivity, reduce the cost of turnover, and build a workforce that is cross-skilled, better informed, and less likely to walk out the door.