Workforce Management
Identify the Roles That Power Your Manufacturing
When you know which roles matter most, you move with purpose. Turn insight into action with a people-first strategy that works.
November 03, 2025
Why Role Prioritization Matters on the Factory Floor
When every second on the factory floor counts, success depends on more than having a full roster. It depends on deploying the right people, in the right roles, doing work that truly matters.
The difference between simply staying afloat and gaining serious ground is knowing which roles move the needle—and investing in them intentionally.
Critical role analysis in manufacturing makes all the difference. It offers a clear, structured way to identify which jobs have the greatest impact and how to prioritize your time, attention, and investment accordingly.
“You need to decide how you’ll differentiate yourself, what you want to be known for, and how you’ll become the best in the world at what you do. From there, you must invest in the roles and the people who can consistently drive your strategy.” says Scott Erker, Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry.
Here, we offer a proven approach to strategic workforce planning in factories, so you can ensure that your talent is placed where it will deliver the most value.
Looking Beyond Titles to Real Impact
Some roles are there to keep things running. Others shape how you’ll compete five years from now. Some are nearly impossible to backfill when vacant.
What makes a role critical isn’t its pay grade or title. It’s the impact it has on daily performance and long-term adaptability.
In many factories, it’s not the VP or director who prevents production downtime. It’s the second-shift supervisor who spots a defect or the automation tech who fixes a fault before the line goes down.
Action Item:
Ask your teams: “If this role sat vacant for 60 days, what would break?” That one question often reveals more than any org chart.
The Manufacturing Lens: Pressure from All Sides
- Manufacturing leaders aren’t just juggling challenges. They’re facing more pressure than peers in other sectors when it comes to: labor skills and shortages (43%)
- Complex new tech, including generative AI (45%)
- Changing consumer behaviors (22%)
- Supply chain shortages (31%)
- Sustainability and the energy transition (35%)
With so much at stake, simply hiring to fill seats is no longer enough. Workforce decisions must be precise, strategic, and focused on value.
The Three Dimensions That Define Role Value
Korn Ferry’s approach to critical role analysis looks at every position through three lenses:
- Strategic Value: Does this role move you closer to future goals like automation, digital maturity, or resilience?
- Business Value: Does it directly impact throughput, quality, uptime, safety, or compliance?
- Talent Scarcity: Is it hard to find, hire, or grow people into this role due to external market trends or internal capability gaps?
Scoring roles across these three dimensions gives you a practical, human-centered way to focus talent efforts where they’ll count most.
Action Item:
Bring cross-functional leaders together (think ops, HR, engineering) to apply this framework and compare real-world insight against current org charts.
Roles That Shape the Future
Some roles go beyond supporting daily output and actually enable transformation. They’re building the systems, tools, and culture that make your plant more agile, resilient, and competitive in the long term.
Think of:
- A digital maintenance lead introducing predictive analytics
- An automation engineer integrating reprogrammable robotics
- A smart factory project manager connecting machines and people
They may not touch the product, but they shape how it will be made tomorrow.
Action Item:
Ask: What capabilities will we need in five years? Then trace backward to identify the roles that must exist now to get there.
Roles That Keep Plants Running
Some roles might not be flashy, but your plant doesn’t move without them. They’re the backbone of day-to-day execution:
- Shift supervisors resolving issues before they spiral
- Quality leads preventing defects at the source
- EHS coordinators who keep people safe and operations compliant
These are the key roles in industrial operations and the clearest link between people and performance. They may not be driving innovation, but they help keep the lights on.
Action Item:
Use real metrics, such as OEE (Overall Equipment Readiness), first-pass yield, and safety incident rates, to connect these roles to hard business outcomes. The numbers tell the story.
Scarce Skills = Business Risk
Even the best job strategy falters if you can’t fill roles. In manufacturing, the scarcest talent is often also the most technical:
- CNC machinists with precision experience
- Robotics programmers
- Machine vision engineers
- Advanced electricians familiar with IIoT systems
These are hard roles to fill and even harder to grow internally, unless you’re intentional about it.
Action Item:
Audit your time-to-fill and turnover for high-scarcity roles. If vacancies linger, it’s not just a hiring issue. It’s a business risk.
How Korn Ferry’s Critical Role Index Can Help Manufacturers
In manufacturing, every role matters, but not every role has the same impact on safety, quality, or output. With limited resources, manufacturers need to be intentional about where to invest time, training, and recognition.
That’s where Korn Ferry’s Critical Role Index (CRI) can help.
The CRI provides a structured, data-driven way to identify which roles on the shop floor and beyond have the greatest influence on business priorities, whether that’s uptime, product quality, cost efficiency, or workforce safety.
Using Korn Ferry’s global talent intelligence, the CRI evaluates roles based on strategic importance, operational impact, and growth potential. It then ranks them by their value to your business.
CRI is part of our broader Talent Suite, a digital platform that includes tools like the Profile Manager, which contains over 10,000 relevant success profiles. These templates outline the skills, competencies, responsibilities, and traits needed to thrive in roles from maintenance tech to operations leader to plant controller.
What makes this especially useful in manufacturing is the ability to:
- Map roles to your strategic goals (like lean transformation or quality improvement)
- Differentiate between proficiency levels (such as junior vs. senior machine operators)
- Tailor recognition and rewards to the roles that truly propel your organization forward
It’s like a blueprint for building a workforce that aligns with what matters most on your line, in your plant, and across your network.
Because it’s built on our deep industrial expertise, with millions of data points, decades of consulting insight, and proven success in global factories, you can trust that the insights are grounded in what works.
In fast-moving environments like manufacturing, leaders don’t need guesswork. They need clarity. The CRI helps them prioritize the roles that drive production, performance, and people outcomes.
What Manufacturers Gain by Prioritizing the Right Roles
What’s the payoff for taking the time and effort to perform critical role analysis? Manufacturers that lead with a critical role mindset gain:
- Smarter hiring focused on people who make a difference
- Stronger retention by showing employees their value
- Faster readiness for change with the right skills in place
- Better alignment between strategy, people, and performance
In other words, you stop reacting and start building.
Ready to build a workforce that’s focused, resilient, and future-ready? Korn Ferry partners with manufacturing leaders to identify critical roles, sharpen talent strategy, and invest where it counts most: on the factory floor and beyond.
Check out our article, Future-Proof Your Organization with the Workforce Skills Needed, to explore how skills assessments must evolve alongside your business needs.
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