Your 3-Year-Old Can Name an Excavator. Can They Name Anything That Happens Inside a Factory?
Lauren Vahle has a challenge for you:
“Go to your local Barnes & Noble, go on Amazon, and try to find books that are set in a manufacturing facility — and you will be hard-pressed to find a single story. And if you find it, please send it to me, because I would love to see it.”
Search for yourself and you’ll find a fantastical chocolate factory, a mouse working in a cheese factory, and historical stories about garment workers. What you won’t find is what Lauren is pointing at: a mainstream, modern story that shows children what manufacturing actually is. Construction has an entire ecosystem of bestselling books about diggers and cranes. Manufacturing has almost nothing.
That near-total absence goes a long way toward explaining why manufacturing has struggled for decades to attract talent — despite offering career paths with strong wages, growth potential, and increasingly sophisticated technology.
Lauren spent 15+ years inside Fortune 50 manufacturers, working from the plant floor to global leadership. She’s also a mom of three elementary-school-aged kids. That combination — deep operational expertise plus watching her own children form their sense of the world — gave her a lens that most workforce development programs are missing.
The Exposure Gap: Identity Forms Before High School
The industry’s workforce efforts overwhelmingly target 16-to-18-year-olds. Technical schools, trade programs, shop class revivals — all aimed at high schoolers. Lauren’s argument is that by that age, it’s already too late.
“By that age, most individuals have formed their identity — they either picture themselves in the role or they don’t.”
A three-year-old can identify an excavator, a bulldozer, and a front loader by name. Not because anyone is training them for construction. Because they’ve seen these machines in stories, toys, and videos since they could hold a board book.
Manufacturing has no equivalent. There are no characters, no stories, no visual vocabulary that makes a factory feel familiar to a five-year-old. And if something never feels familiar, it never feels like a possibility.
What Lauren Is Building: CuriousConveyorCo
CuriousConveyorCo is Lauren’s answer to this gap — a gentle introduction to the world of industry for young thinkers, through children’s books, worksheets, and hands-on learning activities. Her first children’s book, set inside a manufacturing environment and targeted at the K-5 age range, is slated for 2027.
But her thinking goes further. Lauren is exploring gamified apps — interactive environments where kids can learn foundational manufacturing concepts like 5S and lean thinking through play. She’s using AI-enabled content creation tools to prototype these experiences, part of the same wave of no-code development that’s made it possible for non-engineers to build functional apps.
What makes the approach distinctive is its modesty. Lauren isn’t trying to pipeline five-year-olds into manufacturing careers. She’s trying to make manufacturing familiar — to give it the same presence in a child’s world that construction equipment already has. The career decisions come later. The familiarity has to come first.
The Systems Thinking Argument
Lauren also raised a point that cuts deeper than workforce pipelines.
Manufacturing, at its most basic, is systems thinking: raw materials go in, products come out, and there’s a process in between that someone needs to design, run, and improve. That skill set — understanding inputs, outputs, and the processes that connect them — doesn’t become obsolete regardless of how roles evolve with AI and automation.
But it also doesn’t develop on its own. The U.S. education system, with its standards-based approach to teaching math, science, and literacy in silos, doesn’t naturally build it either. Lauren sees exposure to manufacturing environments — even through stories — as a way to develop systems thinking in young children before they’re ever asked to learn it formally.
From Corporate to Entrepreneur
Lauren was candid about what the shift from Fortune 50 leadership to independent work actually feels like. In a corporate role, you’re an expert in your space. People take your calls because they see the brand. Step outside, and you suddenly need to understand marketing, sales, finance, and networking on top of technical expertise.
She described the learning curve as steep but rewarding — and framed it with a lens that ties back to CuriousConveyorCo: her kids are watching her figure it out. Her second grader came home from school and announced she’d told her whole class that her mom was writing a book.
“For them to see that you can go do things if you feel inclined to — whether you know exactly what you’re doing or you don’t — for me, that’s the prize.”
The Bigger Question: AI, Trades, and What Comes Next
The conversation touched on what AI means for the next generation’s career choices — whether it will push more young people toward the trades as white-collar roles face disruption. Lauren’s take was grounded: the conversation about reviving the trades isn’t new, and AI may accelerate interest. But it doesn’t change her fundamental argument.
Regardless of whether manufacturing roles look different in 20 or 50 years — whether humans are executing processes, machines are, or both working together — the foundational understanding of how things get made remains essential. And that understanding starts with exposure.
Why This Matters
The manufacturing skills gap is one of the most discussed problems in industrial America. Enormous sums go into training programs, retention strategies, and recruitment campaigns. Most of that investment targets people who are already old enough to have decided manufacturing isn’t for them.
Lauren Vahle is asking a different question: what if the problem started 10 years before anyone tried to solve it?
Follow Lauren Vahle on LinkedIn. Curious Conveyor’s first children’s book is expected in 2027.