Post a crane operator job today and see what happens. A few years ago, you'd be sorting through applications. Today, you might be waiting weeks — or settling for a candidate who needs months of runway before they're fully productive.
This is the new reality for metal service centers and producers across North America. Hiring and retaining skilled operators has become one of the most persistent operational challenges in the industry. For facilities running multiple shifts, nights and weekends, the squeeze is felt every single day.
A Shortage Years in the Making
The numbers behind the problem are hard to ignore. There are over 400,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs in the United States. In Canada, more than 85% of manufacturers report difficulty filling vacancies — and one-quarter of the country's manufacturing workforce is 55 or older. By 2033, the projected labour gap across North America is expected to reach 3.8 million workers.
Experienced operators are aging out faster than younger workers are entering the trades. Meanwhile, rising wages — the natural result of tight supply and growing demand — are adding pressure to margins already stretched thin. This is a structural shift in the labour market, not just a cyclical dip, and it isn't reversing on its own.
Why Metals Gets Hit Harder
Not every manufacturing role can be filled by a willing worker with a bit of training. Crane operators, fork truck drivers and experienced material handlers are specialised positions. They take time to develop and carry significant safety responsibilities. Once workers build that expertise, they can be hard to keep.
Add to that the physical demands — heavy loads, repetitive movement, loud environments — and the eligible applicant pool narrows further. Then there's the scheduling reality of most metal service centers. Many facilities run two or three shifts, five to seven days a week. You need operators willing to work nights, weekends and holidays, reliably and consistently.
That combination makes metals a particularly difficult environment for workforce planning.
The Knowledge Rarely Documented
Beyond open roles, there's a quieter challenge building in facilities that have relied on long-tenured workers. In manual environments, operational know-how tends to live in people's heads. Experienced crane operators know where material is stored, how to sequence moves and how to navigate a floor that's never perfectly organised. That knowledge accumulates over years, sometimes decades.
When that person retires or takes a position elsewhere, the knowledge goes with them. Training a replacement takes time a busy operation often doesn't have. The more a facility depends on individual expertise rather than documented systems, the more exposed it becomes to the disruption a single retirement can cause.
The Shift You Can't Staff
Facilities running around the clock feel the labour gap most acutely during nights, weekends and shift changes.
Output in a manual operation reflects who's on the floor. It fluctuates based on crew experience, attendance and energy levels. Planning around that variability adds overhead, and absorbing short-staffed nights gets harder as the pool of available workers shrinks.
When labour varies across shifts, the downstream effect is evident:
- Inconsistent throughput: Output varies by shift when it depends on individual operators, making production planning a moving target.
- Night and weekend exposure: These are the hardest shifts to fill and the ones where running short-handed carries the most operational risk.
- Shift change inefficiencies: Material that passes through multiple crews in a day introduces more opportunity for delays, miscommunication and error.
How Automation Closes the Gap
This is where autonomous material handling earns its place in the conversation — not simply as an efficiency multiplier, but as a solution for teams with difficulty staffing crane operator roles.
TELIA is CareGo's flagship technology: an industrial software and control system that automates, optimises and orchestrates heavy industry material handling equipment. The result is significant — a dramatically smaller storage footprint, more capacity, higher throughput and fewer people in harm's way.
In a fully autonomous environment, cranes don't call in sick. They don't slow down at shift change, and they don't need a break. The cranes keep moving consistently, around the clock, regardless of staffing levels on the floor. For facilities managing around unpredictable attendance and hard-to-fill shifts, that consistency changes the equation.
In current CareGo projects, facilities are seeing 2 to 3 positions per shift reallocated. Workers who were solely crane operators before move into supervision, maintenance, quality and planning roles — higher-value work that's better suited to the people who know the operation best.
Less Reliance on Specialised Operators
One of the more practical benefits for service centers struggling to fill specific roles is that automation reduces the dependency on specialised skill sets. When a system manages material movement autonomously, throughput is no longer running through a single person's expertise.
That institutional knowledge gets embedded in the system — consistent, transferable and not vulnerable to a resignation letter.
A Case for Retention, Too
Here's something that tends to catch people off guard: automation can make a facility easier to work in, which improves retention among the people who stay.
One of the transition challenges we hear about regularly is employee resistance during the early stages of automation. But in practice, the physical relief that automated material handling provides often becomes one of its strongest arguments. One of our clients had team members attempt to turn TELIA off after implementation, convinced they could outperform the system manually. They couldn't — and without the crane running autonomously, the physical demands increased so sharply that employees started refusing to come in for their shifts.
The client turned TELIA back on. It has not been turned off since. When workers experience what a well-run automated environment feels like, their perspective tends to shift quickly.
Building for What's Coming
The labour gap in metals isn't going to correct quickly. Reshoring is bringing more manufacturing back to North America, which means more competition for the same pool of skilled operators. Demographic pressures aren't reversing. Wage expectations will keep rising as long as qualified workers are scarce.
Facilities investing in automation now are building a structural advantage: consistent output across all shifts, reduced exposure to labour volatility and operations that can run at full capacity whether or not every position is filled.
The ROI case for automation is strong even before you factor in labour savings. When you do, the question stops being "Can we afford this?" and starts being "How much longer can we afford to wait?"
If you're ready to find out what that looks like for your facility, let's talk.
