(L-R) Robert Trujillo, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett of Metallica pose onstage during Metallica’s All Within My Hands Foundation Presented by the Helping Hands Concert And Auction 2024 at YouTube Theater on December 13, 2024 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
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You might think that a world-famous rock band, a Rust Belt city, and a southern U.S. state would have little in common. And while that may generally be true, it’s the nature of today’s war for talent that our skilled worker shortage unites Metallica, the city of Buffalo and North Carolina in their active efforts to close the skilled trades labor shortage.
Peter Delgrosso, executive director and board member at the Metallica All Within My Hands Foundation, told me about their efforts in an email exchange. “If you have ever been to a Metallica concert, or any concert for that matter, you know that none of what you see on stage is possible without a large crew setting up and breaking down the entire production from town to town, country to country,” he said. “These people are the unspoken heroes here, and all of them are engaged in the trades that not only fuel the concert industry, but the country. Unfortunately, there is a lack of qualified tradespeople today because far too often the trades are misunderstood and misrepresented. That didn’t sit well with the band or AWMH, so we wanted to shine a one-million-watt spotlight on the importance of the trades and demonstrate to people that these jobs are the backbone of our country, enabling people to forge a career capable of creating family-sustaining wages. “
With all that in mind, in 2017 the band and management established AWMH, creating a broader call to action across the Metallica family. Its core mission is to focus on workforce education, the fight against hunger, and critical local services such as disaster relief. “AWMH is now fully integrated into the band’s business interests and has been welcomed with open arms by fans and a wide range of individual and corporate donors,” said Delgrosso. “While the band, management and the board support the foundation’s mission and efforts, the support from fans and corporate donors has been incredible.”
The city of Buffalo and its surrounding region of Western New York, meanwhile, have seen significant investment in manufacturing over the past couple of years, driven by state initiatives like the Buffalo Billion and federal grants for advanced manufacturing. Recent and planned expansions at the Tesla Gigafactory, at Moog for aerospace components, at Worksport for pickup truck parts, and at Polymer Medical for injection-molded medical devices and packaging are welcome news but also add to the region’s skilled worker challenges.
“There appears to be a lot of backshoring of manufacturing coming back to the states,” Tom Kucharski, president and CEO at Invest Buffalo Niagara, the region’s nonprofit, privately funded economic development organization representing the eight counties of Western New York, told me as we chatted via videoconference. “The challenge with this—and it’s not a new challenge; we voiced this early in the Obama administration—is you can’t just plunk down large manufacturing concerns. Depending on the industry, these opportunities are very large, big capital investment, big electrical demand, big water demand and lots of jobs, and we’re struggling as a nation with sites that are ready to go within any type of reasonable time frame where this backshoring is looking to happen.”
To provide support on the skilled trades front for these challenges, the state of New York helped establish the Northland Workforce Training Center in 2019 on a rehabilitated industrial site in Buffalo. NWTC is an industry-driven public-private partnership between employers, educational institutions, community and faith-based organizations and state and local government working to close the skills gap of the labor pool and create economic on-ramps to training, co-ops, internships, apprenticeships, and permanent employment for Western New Yorkers.
America’s southern states are the crucible of the country’s nascent manufacturing resurgence, hosting outposts of such growing multinational companies as GE Aerospace, Toyota, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Pratt & Whitney. North Carolina has been one of the destinations for the big influx of plant expansions and new manufacturing to that region, so the workforce challenge can hit particularly hard there. “Right now, over the last two months, we’ve seen probably the highest levels of job announcements and investments ever in the history of North Carolina,” John Loyack, vice president of economic development for the North Carolina Community College System, told me in an interview. “I think it’s closing in on 22,000 jobs just in the last two months, and neighborhood of $20 billion now.
“Here in North Carolina, we continue to fight the struggle around manufacturing as a career choice,” he continued. “The textile industry is one that has a proud heritage here, but there’ll be plenty of grandparents who may remember the dirtier, not climate-controlled facilities. They don’t want that for their grandchildren. Today, it’s totally changed. It’s a completely different industry. So here in the state, we’re trying to let people know this is a great path, and what we’re seeing is that more and more people are looking at it, and I think the debate over university debt is helping this discussion. But people are recognizing children can pick up the skills they need and pick up some coursework even while they’re in high school. And they may come out and have this huge advantage.”
One element of the state’s efforts to bridge the gap in trades has been centered on the state’s community colleges through its NCEdge program, which has trained over 100,000 North Carolinians, primarily in manufacturing. It partners directly with companies to meet industry needs as reshoring accelerates. Through this public-private partnership training model, North Carolina is equipped to handle new workforce needs tied to increased U.S. production or expansion. “For any of these projects, whether it’s a new industrial opportunity coming in or an existing business that’s expanding, local economic developers and the businesses all know when it comes to planning out that project, the community college system is going to be there at the table, offering support for whatever the training needs are,” Loyack said. “Pratt and Whitney had a big announcement in the Asheville area couple years back. We created a pre-assessment curriculum to help them find talent. They had very specific needs. And so it was a pre-hire, post-hire assessment process that was put into place, and we ran that at three different community colleges for them.”
Metallica and AWMH have also centered their efforts on community colleges. “The Metallica Scholars Initiative just entered its seventh year in 2025,” said Delgrosso. “Since inception AWMH has worked closely with the American Association of Community Colleges to not only select the schools but to ensure that the program is as effective and diverse as possible. AACC has access to over 1,000 community colleges, and it was clear from the beginning that for MSI to succeed, AWMH needed a partner that understood workforce education and had direct ties to these schools and their administrators. Community colleges play a vital role in higher education, enabling a broad range of socio-economic classes of students to engage and receive an affordable and flexible path to education and workforce development. We have found that these institutions punch well above their weight and also care deeply about all their students.”
For Buffalo, engaging with colleges and universities has helped in another way as well. “Talent repatriation is very important for us,” said Kucharski. “Working with the colleges and universities, we make sure that they’re not just selling their education, but they’re also acquainting the folks that are going to school here with what the potential opportunities might be.”
It’s easy to view the talent crunch as an insurmountable problem, given the double whammy of shortages in both worker numbers and skills. But these various efforts are making a tremendous difference. “To date, Metallica Scholars will have helped support over 10,000 students, with our scholars ranging from teenagers to septuagenarians,” Delgrosso said. “It is a truly special program. We have found that Metallica Scholars use our program to learn a trade, reskill into a new trade and upskill enhancing existing skills to advance higher in their career. In year six we took the program national, reaching all 50 states plus Guam, and in year seven we augmented the number of schools to 75 while also adding in new trades that are in serious demand.
“The job isn’t done,” he added. “While our foundation can’t do it all, we do have the ability to continue to expand the program thoughtfully and use the foundation’s platform as a megaphone to remind people how important it is to support the trades. Our ability to convene is also vitally important here because it will take a village for all of us to be ultimately successful.”