I’ve been watching millwork drafting job postings change for years, and the trend is clear: most shops are heading toward a talent problem they’re not prepared for.

Five years ago, companies hired entry-level drafters with basic CAD skills and trained them. Today, everyone wants someone experienced who can contribute on day one.

The problem is obvious once you say it out loud: the people who used to do the training are gone, or about to be.

Twenty years ago, when CNC started taking hold, most shops handled the transition the same way. They bought new machines and tapped someone from the floor.

The Knowledge Drain Nobody Planned For

“You know how we build cabinets. Go learn this software.”

That person figured it out through years of trial and error. Maybe they trained one other person. Maybe not. Over time, entire companies became dependent on two or three individuals who held all the institutional knowledge.

They were burned out. They were difficult to work with. But they were indispensable, so the organization learned to work around them instead of fixing the problem.

Now those people are retiring, and most shops never built a replacement plan.

The numbers reflect what we’re already feeling. Manufacturing is projected to face a massive labor shortage over the next decade, and a large portion of the workforce is nearing retirement. At the same time, very little of that hard-earned knowledge has been transferred to the next generation.

Why Most Shops Aren’t Solving This

Some larger companies recruit from a handful of wood manufacturing and drafting programs. Others split drafting from engineering so junior people can handle shop drawings while senior engineers catch mistakes before fabrication.

On paper, that looks like progress. In reality, it creates a different problem.

Entry-level drafters never truly learn constructibility. They follow templates. They copy old jobs. When something’s wrong, an engineer fixes it.

Instead of teaching people how things work, we’ve built entire layers of correction and rework into the process. The system compensates for lack of experience instead of developing it.

So those junior drafters stay junior. They don’t get meaningful feedback. They don’t get to make mistakes and learn from them the way the previous generation did.

And all the while, companies worry about “brain drain” without changing the systems that caused it in the first place.

The Uncomfortable Truth About 2030

AI isn’t coming to save millwork drafting.

Our industry is too specialized and too fragmented for software companies to build true end-to-end solutions. The tools we use will continue to evolve, but they’ll demand more technical understanding, not less.

The result is that the ideal drafter or engineer, someone who understands construction, manufacturing, software, and coordination, is becoming increasingly rare.

By the end of the decade, most shops that still rely on “the old way” won’t survive. They’ll shut down or get acquired. Many will be rolled into larger organizations, optimized for margins, and stripped down to the most profitable work.

True one-off, fully custom millwork without standards is disappearing. The economics no longer support it at scale.

The New Model Is Already Emerging

We’re already seeing a shift toward separation of roles.

Some companies focus on winning work, managing projects, and installing. Others focus purely on manufacturing approved drawings efficiently. Drafting and engineering increasingly sit outside the traditional shop structure.

This mirrors what happened in commercial construction decades ago, where design, management, and execution became specialized disciplines.

In this model, success depends less on tribal knowledge and more on systems, standards, and coordination.

What This Means for Individual Careers

If you’re early in your career and want to be relevant in millwork long term, you can’t position yourself as a commodity.

Future drafters and engineers need to think more like project managers and technical coordinators — people who understand how materials, hardware, manufacturing, and installation come together, even if they aren’t personally cutting parts on a machine.

That means treating this as a profession, not just a trade skill.

Right now, there’s no clear education path for that. Industry organizations are trying to build it, but real change will only happen when businesses invest in development the way technology companies do.

When demand becomes strong enough, training programs will follow, just like they did with software development.

What Mid-Sized Shops Need to Do Now

If you run a mid-sized millwork company, the decisions you make in the next few years will determine whether you’re still operating in 2030.

You need systems that allow you to recruit, train, and develop people continuously, not just when someone leaves. You need talent at every stage of growth so your business isn’t fragile.

This isn’t just an HR issue. It’s a survival issue.

Look at your market. Look at where construction is heading. Look at how dependent your business is on a small number of individuals.

Your future depends on your ability to replace knowledge before it walks out the door.

The shops that figure this out first will define what millwork looks like in the next decade.

The rest won’t make it that far.

Jacob Edmond

CEO