"Immelt emphasized the pressing need to change this archaic perception of factory work among young students. Parents, teachers, and guidance councilors alike have to be on board, too."

 In this context, the word is counselor.  You aren't speaking of a city council--lawmaker.  You are speaking of someone who offers counsel--help, advice.

I would guess that more factory tours would fascinate students, especially seeing technology in use.  They might want to get involved in the production of robots, for instance, or the computer programs that run them...  It should start at a young age--the fascination with technology and maunufacturing, don't wait until they are juniors in High School to try and interest them.  Make sure they have books that are interesting to read, experiments to try, teachers that have been in industry, not just a teacher whao has only been a teacher, encourage retired factory workers to teach, or even offer someone who has lost their job in manufacturing a teaching job, relaxing the educational requirements some, or offer aneasy path to degreed teaching professional--help with tuition, if necessary, night school, summer school, etc.  The use of mentors could work as well.

Mr. Donilon is right to be concerned about terrorism and declining competitiveness (though I believe US debt and monetary policy trump both).  What I'm surprised by is Mr. Arkless' urging our government to step in and impact our education infrastructure to produce more manufacturing-ready graduates.  Good luck with that strategy.  They can't even get enough high school graduates to write a college-worthy term paper or balance a checkbook. 

Note to manufacturing sector:  whatever solutions our government may offer will be time-late, ineffective and costly.  You'll ultimately need to solve this quandary on your own.  Got an image problem?  Redirect some of your marketing resources to glamorizing manufacturing careers to the candidate pipeline.  Prospective employees ill-prepared?  Collaborate, individually or collectively, with educational institutions (perhaps with a geographic or regional approach) to align programs with skill needs.  Recruiting shortfalls?  Have a conversation with the US Marine Corps, the most effective recruiting organization out there.

In other words, get creative.  Our government will not.

Something IS terribly wrong.   The article states that "if vacant manufacturing jobs were filled today with U.S. workers, experts tell us that the contribution of our manufacturing economy would jump from its current level of $1.8billion to $2.2trillion!"   I'm not buying that - let's do the math.  $2.2TRILLION = $2,200BILLION.  Subtract $1.8BILLION from that and you get $2,198.2BILLION.  Dividing the $2,198.2BILLION increase (the jump) by the 600,000 vacant manufacturing jobs previously stated in the article and you get an economic impact of 3,663,667 for each of those vacant jobs!  That should raise some eyebrows.  Taking it a bit farther, if each existing manufacturing job were similarly productive with respect to its impact on the manufacturing economy, there would only need to be 492 people employed in manufacturing jobs to create the $1.8Billion we currently have (1.8Billion divided by 3,663,667 in per job impact).

If only 600,492 people were needed in manufacturing to create a $2.2TRILLION contribution to our manufacturing economy, then there would be quite a few people currently employed in manufacturing who would be looking for work elsewhere.  GE might be able to maintain full employment if that were the case (I bet those jobs would pay a livable wage and would be quite attractive for the luck few who could get one), but I doubt the US as a whole would be able to do so.