Scottish manufacturing punches well above its weight – while the sector only employs about 7.5% of the country’s workforce, it accounts for 52% of all exports and 54% of all business expenditure on R&D.
It’s a matter of national importance, then, that this is safeguarded for the future; however,
the industry still has a reputation as being a dark, dirty and undesirable career choice for today’s school leavers. How do we go about proving the reality: that manufacturing today is a modern, forward-looking one, with excellent career progression and cutting-edge technology? That was the question on the lips of a group of leading figures from Scottish manufacturing and academia at an Edinburgh roundtable debate hosted by MM in association with the Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Service (SMAS).
Inspiring the teachers
The negative image of manufacturing isn’t teachers’ fault, argued Susan Scurlock, chief executive of Primary Engineer, an organisation dedicated to encouraging primary school children into industry. Rather, it’s the fault of the system. “Secondary schools, in particular, are set up for children to pass exams and go to university,” she said. “As a result, industry isn’t benefitting from what the system is producing. The ability to inspire children to pursue a career in a local manufacturing site just isn’t in a teacher’s priorities.”
The solution? Well, continued Scurlock, teachers need to engage more with industry, and vice versa. “We need to try and encourage industry to speak more to schools,” she said. “When we do that, we see more engagement from the kids and more understanding of the industries in their local area.”
Primary Engineer delivers training courses for teachers in Scotland and England, demonstrating first-hand what industry has to offer – often to great success. “We recently toured some teachers around a factory in Newcastle that makes plastic pipes,” Scurlock said. “All the teachers lived and worked a stone’s throw from the site, but none of them knew it existed. The factory even had two enormous plastic pipes at the gates, but nobody gave it a second glance. The tour was so popular that we were asked to get the teachers off the shopfloor because they were taking too long to go round. They were asking questions about every stage of the process, and took that knowledge and enthusiasm back to the classroom. I’m sure that tour changed their opinions of manufacturing forever.”
The problem with this approach, said Peter Murphy, managing director of Hawick-based Turnbull & Scott, is that manufacturers don’t know how to go about setting up such a tour. “I’m involved with the Developing the Young Workforce scheme (http://bit.ly/2k8b5ma) in the Borders,” he said. “We went out and asked local companies about getting more closely aligned with schools, and they all loved the idea – they just don’t know how to go about it. Schools don’t just ring up and ask to come round, and besides, the manufacturers are too busy making things to go out and try and set these links up.”
Brand power is also a growing factor. “You hear kids nowadays saying they want to work for Samsung, because it’s what they all have in their pockets,” said Dorothy Evans, PhD lead at the University of Strathclyde’s Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC). “Similarly, I have a lot of students who just want to work for the ‘big’ names in manufacturing – Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and the like. It’s all brand-related.”
A re-focus on engineering
A large factor in the apathy towards manufacturing is a shift in what students are looking for. Everyone around the table agreed that students nowadays were more interested in product design than the production side.
“When I first started out in my career, Strathclyde University had a department of production management,” said Bitici. “There was no design element to that course, and the biggest population of students was in manufacturing engineering. Since product design has been added as a degree, a lot of those people have moved over. It’s not the university’s fault, it’s a shifting demographic. People simply want to do the more creative courses.”
Industry needs to get people back making things, not just looking to design them, agreed Sarah Jardine, operations director at Optos. “This focus on designing the ‘next best thing’ means we lose a lot of the skilled people from the manufacturing side of the business,” she said.
Another company seeing similar problems is defence firm, Leonardo. Manufacturing manager, Robert Craighill explained how the company struggles to keep hold of skilled shopfloor staff. “We see individuals go through our apprenticeship scheme, onto the shopfloor and become adept at manufacturing the product,” he said. “Then, we find that a colleague in design likes what they see and decides to poach that individual for their team. There seems to be an attitude that has developed that says ‘if you want to progress, then you have to look towards more of an engineering environment.’”
You have to be clear what you want your staff to do from day one, said Dreze of Mitsubishi. “Before people go onto our shopfloor we put them through a week of training in our own training school, where they learn the basic skills they’ll need on the job. If they want to get a job in design, they have to apply to that part of the business. We’re not after that on the operational side and we’re very clear about that from the start.”
An attitude problem?
Encouraging young workers into industry is just the start of the challenge, said Jardine. Once you have found them, you have to get them working and keep them engaged. “We need to teach businesses how to deal with young workers,” she said. “The younger workers we’ve had in the past have, in my opinion, needed some development to prepare them better for the world of work. For example, the importance of punctuality and meeting deadlines and getting out of the habit of checking phones for messages, social media etc. It can be
a real challenge for both parties.
“This generation is used to instant feedback – be that from friends on social media or getting news online. Workplaces are going to have to change; I think we have fallen into a trap of trying to mould them into what we needed, and what we’d always had.”
Sean Harley, operations director at packaging manufacturer, Smith Anderson agreed. “There’s a real disconnect – how is someone going to cope with operating an automated machine as part of a manufacturing process for eight hours without checking their Facebook?” he said. “It takes a lot of behavioural work to get people out of that habit.”
“If you ask a manufacturer how much data they have, they’ll say ‘too much’. If you ask them how much they use, they’ll say ‘not enough’,” said Jerome Finlayson, regional lead practitioner at SMAS. “So let’s get the next generation of manufacturing professionals using their smart phone to access, analyse and act on this data.”
Paul Richardson, operations director at Brand Rex, had a solution. “You can empower people to use technology in order to get them to reflect on their work and improve their performance,” he said. “We provide access to computers during their breaks to get them off their phones. Some will just use them to check social media, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many do a bit of research into their role and look for ways they can help to improve it.”
Scurlock threw down a gauntlet to the manufacturers in the room. “Young people today have this need for instant gratification, and will have spent years at school going from one classroom to the next and being taught how to pass exams. What makes you the business that breaks that cycle and makes them think ‘yeah, I’m in the right industry’?”
Up stepped Peter Murphy, MD of heating manufacturer Turnbull & Scott. “We have upgraded our old, manual shopfloor control system,” he said. “We haven’t subscribed to the cloud, and we haven’t had to buy tablets for the staff. We just got one that uses people’s smartphones. The idea is that someone can take their phone out to check off the job they’ve just finished and see what they need to do next.”
What Murphy said next was surprising to some around the table. “While they’re doing that, they might see a message from their friend inviting them to the pub that evening, and they might well respond to that on the shopfloor. We don’t mind that, though, as long as the work gets done.”
Of course, an approach like this involves a certain element of trust, and isn’t something everyone can replicate (several delegates pointed out that using mobile phones in their manufacturing environment would compromise health and safety or interrupt electronic signals). However, stressed Finlayson, employers must be able to trust young people. “Young people are pretty smart,” he said. “If we don’t display trust towards them, they will not fully engage. They know they’re working in a certain type of environment and a sense of apathy towards working there grows.”
The answer, he continued, was to focus on continuous improvement and getting staff to develop themselves and take the company forward. “As an industry, we need to realise that manufacturing requires precision, predictability and repeatability which can sometimes come across as mundane and repetitive, but if CI is part of the day job there can often be a lot of excitement to it.”
The problem here, said Jardine of Optos, is that “CI won’t necessarily get people through the door and applying for jobs. Once you get people onto the site and tour them around, they realise that the job is essentially in two parts – one is the day job and the other is looking for ways to make the day job better. CI on its own, though, won’t pique any interest amongst people just looking to get into manufacturing.”
Changing perceptions
Industry won’t attract new blood by only targeting school-leavers. It goes a lot deeper than that. As the roundtable agreed, schools have a role to play in getting young people interested in a career in manufacturing. But, there is nothing stopping industry itself from singing its own praises even louder.
This was a point passionately emphasised by Wayne Thomson, production engineering manager at Technip FMC. “Over 90% of Scotland’s workforce is not in manufacturing,” he said. “However, if you can say to someone that they can be part of that tiny minority and yet be responsible for over half of the country’s exports and R&D, that can be really empowering.”
A sentiment echoed by Smith Anderson’s Harley: “We need to sell manufacturing as a strong footing, something we are passionate about and something that can grow the country’s economy,” he said. “There is a worrying number of people, not just at school-leaving age but even into their 30s, who have their eyes closed to the power of the manufacturing industry.”
Changing public perception of the manufacturing industry will be a long road, and it certainly won’t be easy.
However, as the roundtable demonstrated, industry is willing to make an effort to encourage people back into the fold and secure Scottish – and British – manufacturing’s long-term future.
