Find the gap

The evidence for a manufacturing skills shortage is anecdotal. Average pay settlements at 3%, their lowest for 18 months, says the EEF, don't suggest a shortage of people. And though employers worry about falling numbers of physics and chemistry students, research for this article by the sector skills council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies (Semta) shows that the total of physics A* to C grades achieved at GCSE rose 41% between 1996 and 2006, and the number in chemistry 39%. Yet while many employers don't have a problem - Saint-Gobain Glass UK (below) is one - others warn of either a current skills gap or, in a few years, a yawning chasm. Semta says 21% of UK engineering companies reported skill gaps in 2007 among professionals, skilled trades (craft) and technicians, especially in CNC machine operations, computer aided design (CAD) and welding skills. During 2007, 17% of UK engineering establishments had over 17,000 hard-to-fill vacancies costing the UK economy over £820 million in lost gross value added. They cited lack of qualifications, skills or relevant work experience. The EEF's take, according to senior economist Lee Hopley, is that in the past year nearly two-thirds of companies had difficulty recruiting experienced engineering staff and a third recruiting experienced technicians. The technician shortage is easily explained, says Simon Roberts, manufacturing specialist at Jonathan Lee Recruitment of Stourbridge, West Midlands: "Government has pushed people to think the whole point of going to school is to go to university." Elsewhere the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) sees the need for 85,000 technicians, apprentices and graduates in the West Midlands alone by 2014. BAE Systems tells the Lancashire Evening Post it is beginning to "struggle" to find the right graduates. The Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC) says skills are about to become a priority. For now, says an SBAC spokesman, the situation in the USA is even worse - 40% of their aerospace engineers are due to retire. But that might mean a brain drain to the US. The recruiter has a similar story. Roberts says: "When I started, if you had a vacancy, within a day you could get five candidates that would be interested. Now it's increasingly more difficult to find these people." Says Hopley: "There are two issues. One is recruiting the skills you need... The second issue applies to manufacturing more than some other sectors, which is that they need to climb up the value chain and [that] requires an evolution of skills within the business as well." According to Semta, 11% of UK engineering employees have no qualifications and a third are under-qualified. The training need is a daunting 500,000-plus people across management, professional and core technical occupations. Even though engineering will employ fewer people, it must train 38,500 new recruits a year across all occupations in UK engineering to replace those retiring. The UK engineering workforce is older than in other sectors, with only 9% aged 16 to 24, compared to 14% on average. Over a quarter of chartered engineers are over 65. Dr Anil Kumar, director of education and policy at the Engineering and Technology Board (ETB), puts replacement demand for engineers at eight times the number of new jobs that will be created by normal economic activity. "Employers finding vacancies hard to fill now have seen nothing yet. The number needed is huge. But no-one has done enough work to say what's needed precisely," says Kumar. Roberts, a Coventry native, blames "the lack of infrastructure" - fewer apprenticeships. In Coventry's glory days, the town was full of firms offering them. Now they're just beginning to creep back on to the radar. "People have become more and more disenchanted with manufacturing. They've had years and years of seeing redundancies." Many skilled men - and it was mostly men - left industry. He left to train as a schoolteacher. "Too many youngsters think engineering is a decaying industry, with dark, grimy workplaces and oily machines," says Graham Stirling, managing director of Plymouth's Barden Bearings. The credit crunch is taking its toll. Roberts reports that, while Jonathan Lee's permanent recruitment business is beginning to struggle, contract placements are performing strongly: "People use that flexibility until things become more certain." More job-seekers are turning down new posts: "Why leave a job?," he asks. "You might be better off staying put. Better the devil you know!" And rising fuel costs are causing candidates to spurn offers that mean travelling from Birmingham to Coventry. High-technology electronics and aerospace companies have immense retirement problems, says e2v group HR director Peter Scraton. However hard e2v and similar companies try to develop their own pipelines to schools and universities, he fears, the pipeline will dry up. The universities can't run courses if the students don't choose them: "If there are no bums on seats, departments close." Small companies find it hardest to recruit, but then they offer fewer apprenticeships. Tier one suppliers have an extra problem. One Merseyside aerospace supplier told us that skills-strapped local employers like Rolls-Royce, BAE and Airbus, all operating in the north west, "suck the available people out of the marketplace". The worm may be turning. In May, the Learning and Skills Council reported employers' record training spending. EEF's Hopley estimates this to be around £35bn per year. She says they are returning to apprenticeships as a way of inducting qualified young people into the sector. And they are working with schools to promote careers in the sector, though the vast array of such initiatives "make it difficult for schools and employers to know which is the most suitable," she says. Firms are advertising and recruiting from overseas. The BBC reported recently that GKN had recruited welders from Polish shipyards to make Land Rover chassis at its Telford factory. UK engineering company Haden Freeman says it is now looking as far afield as Brazil to recruit qualified personnel, having already exhausted Eastern Europe. Manufacturers are taking on older workers, says the EEF. And the proportion of female registered engineers is growing. But slowly: women account for just over 3% of the total. Just one woman in 20, and the same proportion of 16 to 19 year olds, considers herself very well informed about the work of engineers. According to Terry Marsh, director of Women Into Science, Engineering and Construction (WISE), the number of women studying engineering reached 15% some time ago: "All the quick and easy wins have been achieved and we are now into the hard wins." Haden Freeman MD Nigel Hirst says: "Engineering simply is not promoted enough to young people choosing their career path." But manufacturers are at last developing links with local schools, colleges and universities. In the south west, for example, the number of companies with links to educational establishments has risen from two-thirds to three-quarters in the past year. In the West Midlands, the local Manufacturing Advisory Service is trying to attract new recruits by taking students into factories to show them what the work involves. More than 2,000 students are taking part in the programme - Inside Manufacturing Enterprise (IME) - co-ordinated by Coventry University Enterprises. Since its launch in 2003, IME says it has helped more than 2,000 students and teachers and brought JCB, Jaguar, Caterpillar and Ricoh into a scheme that now includes 40 manufacturing companies. Government can set the tone, says e2v's Scraton, but "I think employers have got to take responsibility. We need to get lobbying." Barden Bearings' Stirling, also chairman of the Plymouth Engineering Skills Council, agrees the answer is in employers' own hands. More people ought to know about the opportunities that engineering offers, says Stirling. So he's telling them. He formed 20 local employers into Enginuity, a cooperative programme to promote engineering and reduce training, recruitment and skills costs. Plymouth's manufacturers had not communicated to the youngsters what engineering as a career is all about. And they had failed to make training providers understand what they needed - partly because they weren't sure: "We had to help companies identify what training and skills they actually needed and the potential benefits of this to their businesses," Stirling says. "Local colleges have now started to offer us training courses at our premises, at six in the evening if we need them. It means that employers can pay for training courses that don't necessarily hinder their production process." Barden recently needed four more Six Sigma practitioners for its own factory. It asked other employers if they needed that training, too. Fourteen people did, so Barden hosted the session conducted by the South West Manufacturing Advisory Service. "By aggregating our training needs," says Stirling, "we were able to afford the best training provision for our staff. We've held similar training courses since then, and the places are filled very quickly." Local colleges and universities are now bringing in the relevant training expertise from EEF and other providers, rather than trying to develop their own material for specific training programmes. Stirling believes this was a key ingredient in Enginuity's success. And instead of whingeing about a poor press image he worked closely with local editors, "to provide them with positive stories about what our local manufacturing companies are doing inside their plants". At the first of a series of Enginuity schools engineering challenges last November, students constructed wind turbines and measured the electricity they generated. At another, students had to construct a model submarine and navigate it round a series of obstacles. In just a year, says Stirling, "communication between businesses and educational establishments has improved, training initiatives in local colleges have been set up and we've seen real progress in attracting young people into the profession". Jonathan Lee Recruitment's Roberts says employers should 'recruit for attitude, train for skills'. E2v's hiring techniques, says Scraton, focus on competencies: "That's what you are hiring for. If you raise the bar you get a big drop out rate." One of the best things to find in a candidate is their willingness to work for you, he says, but some HR departments refuse to consider such an approach. They want a perfect match between job and candidate. Inevitably they're disappointed. The message at Saint-Gobain, Humberside, is the same. Says UK managing director Dr Alan McLenaghan: "We don't have skills shortages. I believe that if you are recognised as a good employer you don't suffer from skills shortages." But then for many of the roles he is looking for, McLenaghan isn't over-prescriptive about the talent he's after. He doesn't always want specific skills: "We want the right attitude. If they've got the right attitude, we can teach them many of the skills required for the glass industry. "However, even when we are recruiting in specific skills - such as within engineering - we tend to attract good skilled people because we are seen as a fair and good employer." Could it be that simple?