Reindustrializing France: Where to Find Skills and Land?

The cover image of this article was generated by AI.

What we learned from the study:

• Re-industrialization of France and jobs: Between 600,000 and 800,000 additional industrial jobs will be needed by 2035 to achieve a 12% share of GDP, i.e. around 50,000 to 67,000 new jobs per year.
• Need for land: 69% of industrial managers questioned in the study say they are looking for less than 2 hectares to expand existing sites or create new ones as part of their reindustrialization strategy.
• Site extensions vs. new site creations: of the 1,703 new sites planned in France, 1,050 are extensions to existing sites (38%), while 379 involve the creation of new sites (14%).
• The French are very ambivalent: while the majority of French people would like to see reindustrialization, many are concerned about pollution and prefer price to the made-in-France origin of a product…
• Attractiveness needs to be worked on: the image associated with industry remains negative overall, and is an obstacle for career guidance, filling up learning programs and therefore finding talents.

Learn Assembly’s point of view

Re-industrialization requires an increasingly skilled workforce, as technologies become more sophisticated and technical. The industry is therefore caught in a scissor effect:

• on the one hand, an increase in the expected level of skills, and therefore greater, longer and more costly learning needs
• on the other hand, a drop in the level of vocational high school students, due to the chronic under-investment suffered by vocational high schools and a lack of attractiveness fueled by the negative image of industry (post-thirty glorious years social plans, pollution, working conditions).

Despite training 120,000 young people a year in industrial trades (source: la fabrique de l’industrie), only half of them remain in the industry. This figure reveals the importance of retaining young people, rather than increasing learning capacity. Add to this the fact that the number of unfilled jobs is already 60,000 (source: Dares). Increased recruitment will therefore only come about if learning programs are better filled and, above all, if apprentices are better retained. This discrepancy between professions that recruit, but fail to train, and when they do manage to do so, fail to retain, should call branches and companies to question their remuneration policies, and more generally the overall package they offer, against a backdrop of inflation and rising housing costs. Re-industrialization will require massive investment in training, which can be pooled, training of trainers and an ecosystemic dynamic, as no single player can resolve such complex and intertwined issues.

Link to the study

Learn Assembly is a hybrid consulting firm created in 2013 to support the transformation of all those involved in learning and employment. Our mission is to help them play a strategic role in their organizations to meet the challenges of skills in a context of environmental transition and technological transformation. We support the general management and L&D departments of major groups, public bodies and higher education institutions in their strategic development.