In a new twist on rating manufacturing locations, SmartAsset looked at data for 483 metro areas and came up with a list of best places to work in manufacturing which includes data on employment and income growth in manufacturing, as well as the density of manufacturing jobs and housing costs.
The group discovered that it was not big cities but instead smaller metro areas that dominated this list. The average population across the top 10 locations is about 300,000. But if you discount Greenville, N.C. and Ogden-Clearfield, Utah that figure drops in half to 150,000.
Also in the study, there are some places where manufacturing jobs are growing pretty rapidly, such as Ogden-Clearfield, where the number of manufacturing jobs grew by 55% from 2010 to 2015.