Out of the 378 metro areas analyzed nationwide, the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville area came in at 39th for the Best places to Work in Manufacturing.

Manufacturing has a special place in the American story, but for the past few decades, this sector has been largely on the decline, impacting many workers and affecting decisions around things like budgeting and where they call home.

But thanks to the Space Industry, the #SpaceCoast has seen a boom in manufacturing jobs.

Lockheed Martin has a significant presence in north Brevard and it’s growing. They are in the stages of renovating the 58,000 sq ft. building that once housed the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and will be used in the assembly of the Orion spacecraft, the capsule Lockheed is building for NASA’s upcoming moon missions.

Florida’s Space Coast is also home to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Boeing Company (its space and launch division headquartered in Titusville), while Northrop Grumman Corp. employs more than 4,000 workers in Melbourne, L3Harris Technologies Inc. employs 6,800 people locally, within a robust supply chain in the aerospace and advanced manufacturing sectors.

To find the best places to work in manufacturing, SmartAsset compared 378 metro areas across the following metrics:

• manufacturing as a percentage of the workforce
• job and income growth between 2015 and 2018
• job and income growth between 2017 and 2018
• housing costs as a percentage of income and unemployment

Key Findings

• About one in 10 U.S. jobs is in manufacturing. Manufacturing represents 11.39% of jobs on average across all 378 metro areas we analyzed in our study. The metropolitan area where manufacturing makes up the highest percentage of jobs is Elkhart-Goshen, Indiana, where 57.45% of all jobs are in the manufacturing sector. The area where this rate is lowest is Laredo, Texas, where just 0.84% of the workforce is in manufacturing.
• In recent years, manufacturing income has grown faster than jobs in the industry. From 2015 to 2018, the average number of manufacturing jobs has grown by just 3.66%, while the average income for manufacturing workers has grown by 6.44%

The full report, including methodology and key findings, can be found here: https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-places-to-work-in-manufacturing-2020.