AUGUSTA – While Gov. Paul LePage joined business leaders Monday to launch a campaign to interest more Maine students in manufacturing jobs, a new legislative committee was getting the rest of the story: More than 400,000 Mainers will reach retirement age in the next two decades, creating demand for what an economist called a quality work force.

Jobs were the theme of the day as the governor joined the Manufacturers Association of Maine, business leaders and students to launch a statewide marketing campaign to draw young Mainers to manufacturing jobs that employers are having trouble filling.

One reason is that students aren’t getting the word, LePage said, because schools are too focused on directing students to college and aren’t telling them about opportunities in business.

“Our schools have been in denial of what’s going on out there,” LePage said.

The LePage administration says the state’s manufacturing sector employs nearly 51,000 people, with average annual salaries of $50,000. More than half of all manufacturing careers in Maine are considered high-tech jobs, but many go unfilled because applicants lack the needed skills.

That’s the case for the Mathews Brothers window manufacturer in Belfast, which needs people with the skills and aptitude to run sophisticated machinery.

“We’re coming up with a talent gap,” the company’s director of marketing and international sales, Bob Maynes, said during a news conference to announce the new outreach effort.

In northern Maine, there’s a growing need for workers in woods-related industries, said Alexandra Ritchie, managing director of government and community relations for Cate Street Capital, parent company of Great Northern Paper.

The Millinocket mill, which is branching out with a new torrefied wood product to be used in coal-fired power plants in Europe to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, employs 257 people. But many of those skilled workers are aging and will have to be replaced.

“We must be thinking a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now,” said Ritchie.

Maine’s work force is indeed aging, economist Charles Colgan told legislators Monday.

During the next decade, 187,000 people in the state will become eligible for retirement, and in the decade after that, 218,000 more will reach retirement age, said Colgan, of the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.

Although many will likely hang onto their jobs into traditional retirement years, all will gradually leave the workplace, he said.

With fewer people joining the work force in the next two decades, the number of workers will shrink by 50,000 to 60,000, creating a need to recruit from out of state, Colgan told the Joint Select Committee on Maine’s Workforce and Economic Future.

“For our long-term competitiveness, we’re not going to be able to compete as we once did on the quantity of our work force, and so we will have to compete on the quality of our work force. It will be the only thing that we will have to work with in an internationally competitive market,” Colgan said.

The committee, meeting for the first time Monday, was formed by legislative leaders and is being asked to produce legislation to address the “skills gap” and create a better atmosphere for business to thrive.

The committee cites a study that says from now to 2018, about 4,000 jobs in Maine will go unfilled because workers lack the skills to fill them.

LePage, a Republican, said he supports the work of the committee.