Ford CEO Jim Farley believes the shortage of skilled tradespeople in the United States has grown too large—and too varied by region and occupation—for any single employer or state to solve on its own.

"Skilled trades are the backbone of our country and American manufacturing, and the backbone of the American Dream," Farley told media in remarks accompanying a new report from the Alliance for America's Skilled Trades. For Farley, the issue is personal: his grandfather was a mechanic, and his father grew up around cars. "No one company is going to solve this alone. It's way too big of a problem," he insisted.

The report marks the first major public product of the Alliance for America's Skilled Trades, a corporate coalition launched this summer by Ford, BlackRock, Google, and Carhartt. The founding members span automotive manufacturing, asset management, technology, and workwear—an unusually wide range of industries for a single workforce coalition. Fortune first reported the formation of the group in July.

One day before the report's release, Farley and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced Michigan LIFT (Launchpad for Industrial Innovation and Transformation), a $2 billion public-private initiative. Under the plan, Ford aspires to award up to $1 billion in contracts to participating suppliers over the next decade, while the investment bank aims to provide up to $1 billion in financing to those suppliers. That timeline runs roughly parallel to the horizon of the report's shortage projections, which extend through 2035.

Farley said a wealth of data already exists on what he calls "the essential economy," but that it remains "scattered—and hard to compare." To close that gap, the alliance is launching the America's Skilled Trades Dashboard, which he described as a first-of-its-kind tool that consolidates the information in one place. The aim is to give the employers, educators, and policymakers the report urges to coordinate a shared set of numbers to work from.

Dimon credited the city of Detroit with demonstrating over the past decade "what is possible when business, government, and community leaders work together for the long term." Michigan LIFT, he added, will work to connect customer demand, capital, and public resources "so more companies can grow, more workers can participate, and more critical capabilities can scale here in the United States."

The Numbers Behind the Shortage

The new report, titled State of America's Skilled Trades, finds that employers will need to fill roughly 1.7 million skilled-trades openings each year through 2035. More than 18 million people now work in the trades, contributing an estimated $3.8 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product in 2025, according to figures the report cited from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Yet the alliance found there is no single, uniform national shortage. Instead, data centers, manufacturing plants, grid projects, housing construction, and infrastructure investment are creating distinct labor pressures in different places, while retirement, worker migration, training capacity, and poor completion rates impose different constraints in each.

The demographics add to the strain. Nearly one-quarter of skilled-trades workers are 55 or older, compared with just 11 who are younger than 25. Across the formal training pathways the report is able to measure, the country is preparing roughly 55 workers for every 100 needed nationally—though the authors caution that the figure does not count all employer-led and on-the-job routes into the workforce.

Shortages Differ by Trade—and by State

The labor challenge, the report finds, can look radically different depending on the occupation. Industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights rank at the 98th percentile nationally for shortage pressure among the 523 occupations measured. Electricians rank at the 85th percentile, while automotive technicians sit at the 54th.

Geography further complicates the picture. Texas and North Carolina each gain about 5,000 trades workers annually on net through interstate migration, while New York loses roughly 9,000 more workers than it gains. The largest single interstate flow runs from California to Texas, at about 5,000 workers a year.

Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, which led the report's quantitative analysis, described the fast-growing states as "essentially importing the workers that they're failing to train."

The Completion Problem

The report also argues the challenge is not simply getting more people into apprenticeships and technical programs. Of every 100 people who start a skilled-trades apprenticeship, a Burning Glass Institute analysis found, only 48 complete it—and just 29 enter a trade occupation within five years of leaving. In related postsecondary programs, 48 out of 100 complete, while 34 ultimately end up working in a skilled trade. The report notes the two pathways draw from different data sources and are not directly comparable.

That creates a problem extending beyond recruitment, particularly as companies and states attempt to meet demand from major capital projects. Experienced workers are needed not only to fill jobs but also to mentor apprentices, supervise jobsite learning, and teach the next generation. If those workers retire or get pulled into immediate project work, the training system itself can lose capacity.

A Call for Coordination

The report calls for employers, labor groups, educators, local and state governments, workforce organizations, and funders to coordinate their responses. Its recommendations include improving completion and placement outcomes; providing childcare, transportation, and other support for trainees; strengthening the links between high school career programs and apprenticeships and jobs; and planning workforce needs when large projects are announced—rather than after hiring becomes urgent. The report's own metrics—apprenticeship completion rates, the 55-workers-per-100 pipeline gap, and interstate migration flows—provide concrete benchmarks against which coordinated efforts like Michigan LIFT can be measured over the coming decade.

Farley framed the findings as an argument against siloed approaches. "It takes people breaking out of their silos," he said. "It takes large and small and medium-sized employers, educators, policymakers, local leaders, and politicians all actually working together."

"Ford is America's automaker," Farley said while announcing Michigan LIFT, "and we believe American manufacturing's best days are ahead."

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool, and an editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.