The chapter overviews the book, sets the background and context, outlines the analytical framework, and introduces the book’s findings and perspectives. Ethiopia’s high economic growth averaged nearly twice the continent’s average GDP growth for nearly 25 years between 1994 and 2019. Moreover, Ethiopia has a track record of being among African countries that have prioritised industrialisation, practised active industrial policy and targeted manufacturing FDI to build productive capacity based on abundant and low-cost labour since the 2000s. However, despite the success in attracting massive foreign productive investment in the 2010s, creating an industrial workforce became a significant and complex challenge for the Ethiopian government and manufacturing firms. Africa’s second most populous country, with abundant labour, struggled to ensure a stable flow of workers, thus threatening to erode its comparative advantage in labour cost. It was a critical puzzle for government policymakers and foreign investors alike. Given the lagging industrialisation and related experiences, the development of an industrial workforce is an under-researched field, and the book provides a crucial insight into the challenges of workforce development and industrialisation in Africa. The book brings new empirical evidence and alternative perspectives from extensive primary research that combines diverse but complementary methodologies. An appendix to the book presents a comprehensive explanation and details of the research methodology, including the various data collection and analysis methods, with the expectation that many researchers would be interested. The development of the industrial workforce is primarily influenced by the interplay between multiple drivers—the government’s industrial policies, the strategy and nature of firms, the quality of the industrial ecosystem, and the country’s broader political economy and locality. Moreover, as prime players, firms are responsible for building an industrial workforce at the heart of their strategies and capabilities. The process, characterised by tensions, imbalances, and interplay among these drivers, has shaped the variations and unevenness in workforce development in Ethiopia’s manufacturing sector.