The next time you see Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump out on the stump harping about the importance of importance of good-paying jobs or a strong manufacturing sector, think about Jeromy Eickhoff.
The 37-year-old Perry County resident is a living breathing example of America's new manufacturing sector and the challenge that the two presidential candidates face as they try to sell their claims that they'll bring back the nation's lunchpail past.
Eickhoff is the graduate of a high-tech, 10-week-long machine shop training program that left him with skills so in demand that he found himself besieged with job offers and had a position waiting for him when he finished his certificate program back in April.
"It's probably one of the best things I've ever done in my life," Eickhoff said Tuesday as he led a tour group through a training classroom at Harrisburg Area Community College's Midtown campus.
After hitting a peak of 19 million jobs in 1979, manufacturing now accounts for about 12 million U.S. jobs today, according to a tally by The Atlantic Monthly.
Employment held steady at about 17 million jobs during the 1980s and 1990s. But the sector began hemorrhaging jobs when the dot.com bubble burst in the early 'Aughts and then, again, during The Great Recession.
The sector lost a total of 5 million jobs during those two downturns and never really rebounded, The Atlantic reported.
So perhaps its understandable that Trump's vows to bring steel back to Pittsburgh and Clinton's promises to invest billions of dollars in manufacturing resonate with Rust Belt crowds.
It's unlikely that either Trump or Clinton could bring back the kind of lunchpail jobs that most Pennsylvanians remember from the state's manufacturing heyday.
Those low-skill, entry-level jobs are mostly gone now.
But here in that lab at HACC's Midtown campus, students such as Eickhoff are getting the training they need to compete in a new manufacturing sector - one that requires more specialized training and far fewer bodies to do the work.
With a grin, he punches a few keys on a high-tech milling machine. A few seconds later, a 3-D rendering of one face of a meat-tenderizer appears on the screen.
"I did the programming for that myself," he said, adding that it would take about 45 minutes for the machine to produce the part he'd programmed it to manufacture.
Rarely at a loss for words, HACC's president, John J. "Ski" Sygielski, acknowledges that the manufacturing sector still suffers from something of an image problem and says it's tough to attract students into the programs and to match them with employers.
"We're still trying to educate people about the noble profession of manufacturing," he said.
According to data compiled by the National Association of Manufacturers, an industry trade group, manufacturing jobs accounted for 9.71 percent of non-farm employment jobs last year.
An $80 billion a year industry (as of 2014), Pennsylvania's 12,554 manufacturing firms accounted for 12 percent of Pennsylvania's gross state product, the trade group's data showed. The jobs paid an average of more than $70,000 a year.
"The manufacturing sector is not dead," Patrick Harker, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, who was also on the tour, said.
The regional face of the Washington agency that sets the country's monetary policy, is heavily involved in workforce development and it's working to promote manufacturing jobs and job-training.
"There were issues around global trade," Harker said, alluding to so-called "dumping" of cheap, foreign steel by such countries as China and South Korea.
"For our economy to be a success we need to continue to grow the skill level of our employees," Harker said during a brief interview after the tour wrapped up. "
And while it's good that specialists like Eickhoff have found jobs, manufacturing has now changed in such a way that the sector no longer can provide the sort of entry-level jobs that fired the old economy.
"A lot of small employers don't have the resources to train people from scratch," which means efforts to promote programs such as the one at HACC or through apprenticeships are key, he said.
As The Atlantic reported back in April, America's manufacturing workers are graying. And millennials are much less likely to go into manufacturing than their fathers or grandfathers.
Eickhoff said he's seeing that passing of the baton first-hand.
"The technology evolves and you evolve with it," he said. "The older and younger guys are teaching each other a lot."