BELLAIRE — David Humphreys Jr., President of Lion Industries, said he sees a resurgence of the American manufacturing industry and work in the trades coming over the next several years.

Lion Industries in Bellaire is a metalworking and manufacturing family business that started in the 1990s with coal mining. It has since expanded to several businesses including trucking and manufacturing work.

Humphreys grew up in St. Clairsville and got his degree from Pennsylvania State University while he spent breaks and weekends helping his father out with the company. He officially returned to the family business in 2000 and has been working there ever since, now in a directorial role.

The company will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2025 and a lot has changed over the time that Lion Industries has been around.

Humphreys said one trending struggle in the industry has been finding labor to meet an increase in demand for services. Many young people don’t get the same kind of encouragement to go into the trades that they do to go into a traditional college education.

“There was a big push from guidance counselors and teachers pushing a lot of kids into going to college and, unfortunately, there hasn’t been a big enough push or infrastructure as far as schooling for the trades,” he said.

However, he said he feels this is slowly beginning to change as kids and their families realize more and more that construction and the trades are viable career options where one can make a good living without taking on too much debt.

“I do see that a lot of schools and a lot of parents are starting to see the value in getting into this type of industry and that is a lot different than it was back when their parents were coming into it,” he said.

Lion Industries works with John Marshall High School and Belmont Career Center to assist with programming for students interested in the trades.

While it won’t happen overnight, he sees the younger workforce growing in the next five or 10 years.

Another big change Humphreys has seen in the industry is the pace at which projects move.

Now, with quicker communication and more advanced technology, a lot can happen in a day, or an hour.

“Everything moves so fast now that we could be working on a project one minute and get a phone call for an emergency situation and have to switch gears, start a whole other project the next,” he said.

Humphreys said some technological changes over time, like having to make frequent updates to machinery coding, can be difficult to keep up with training-wise and financially.

“The technology’s changing so fast that even CAB programming that I learned when I was in college is completely outdated and it seems like every two or three years you almost have to get new training in order to keep up with the changes that are going on,” he said.

Other than that, manufacturing and construction are largely the same, he said. Cutting tables, press brakes, plate rollers and other pieces of equipment are largely the same as they were decades ago and there is still a lot of manual labor involved.

“Some things just don’t change,” he said.

Humphreys said he thinks jobs that have been outsourced to other countries will be coming back to the U.S. and the area, especially with prices of materials potentially going up due to President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs.

“I see a resurgence of the manufacturing industry. I think the country is going to want to become more self-sustaining,” he said.

He also sees there being more and more well-paying jobs in the Ohio Valley area, causing more people he grew up with to move back to raise their families here.

“Back when I was in high school, everyone wanted to leave and never come back, because there wasn’t a whole lot here to offer, but that time has changed,” he said.