Securing jobs for the future

LAST MONTH, Automate UK brought together businesses and apprentices from across the Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and North Buckinghamshire area to celebrate the launch of our Apprenticeship Cluster – an initiative designed to address the persistent and critical skills shortage in the Manufacturing industry.

The timing couldn’t be more fitting. As we mark Apprenticeship Week, with this year’s theme, "Skills for Life", the urgency of addressing skills gaps has never been clearer. In industries like manufacturing—where innovation and future-proofing are essential—apprenticeships aren’t just beneficial; they’re a necessity.

The Apprenticeship Cluster initiative separates our 600+ members into clusters, coordinating high—quality regional training opportunities for young people and convening business leaders, educators, and apprentices to help shape the future workforce. The clusters work together to share best practices in apprenticeship training, to promote interest in manufacturing careers, and to expand the talent pool for member companies and their end users. The programme operates under three core pillars: Partnership, Training, and Talent Pipeline, delivering 360-degree support to our 600+ member firms.

Our goal? To help businesses attract and retain talent by offering reciprocal training opportunities, team building events, and value-adding projects that benefit both employees and their organisations.

The stakes are high

As we launch the initiative, the UK continues to face a shortage of engineers and technicians, impacting economic growth & infrastructure delivery. These shortfalls aren’t just bad news for potential employees but also point to the immediate risk of the UK being left behind on the global stage – not just within the manufacturing sector, but across many of the key, high-growth potential sectors highlighted in the Government’s Industrial Strategy Green paper at the end of last year.

Appetite in the UK for growth through automation is substantial: 42% of businesses surveyed by MAKE UK have currently adopted robotic automation with a further 28% wanting to automate more of their processes. According to a Beaming report, nearly 44% of UK SMEs plan to invest in automation, creating an estimated market value of nearly £2.6 billion.

So, what’s holding us back? Many countries across the EU have their own robot manufacturers as well as well-developed industries for processing and packaging machinery, automation for logistics, and much more. In the UK we have high-quality manufacturers of processing and packaging machinery, but no industrial robot manufacturers - essentially, we’re experiencing emergency-levels of skills shortages when it comes to the deployment and use of automation. This shortage of critical skills threatens substantial economic costs, with the Public Accounts Committee warning last year that the UK currently lacks the expertise and capacity required to successfully deliver major infrastructure projects.

Skills for tomorrow

To mitigate the risk of falling behind, the question is not if, but how, we adopt these technologies in an equitable way so people currently working in the manufacturing sector can be upskilled, and people in education are provided with the skills for tomorrow, and a pathway to prosperity. Providing meaningful, practical qualifications for young people whose skillset may be ideally suited to a career in manufacturing and engineering, but who prefer a different route or may struggle to gain qualifications in our current education system, for example, would lead to vastly increased opportunity across the UK.

Critical to this will be ‘derisking’ skills – the Apprenticeship Levy, in its current form, is too restrictive and applies only to particular types of apprenticeship-based training. SMEs are encouraged to hire apprentices who are unsure if they want to do that job for the long term – making them a risky bet for organisations with little to no money to gamble with. Only once we make reskilling a reality for smaller firms can we start thinking about establishing a foundation of skills to deliver on our industrial and economic targets.

But it’s not just the employer who stands to benefit. Government figures suggest that some 47% of apprentices drop out of their programme, often citing a perceived lack of quality in the training provided as the key reason for their decision. By getting to grips with the needs of both the employer and the apprentice, and by pooling resources and experience so as to deliver the best opportunities, we can ease this tension and give apprentices of all ages a better experience – whilst derisking the taking-on of apprentices for employers who want to be involved. Our Apprenticeship Cluster is a step towards this goal, with plans for more across the country to address the skills gap and ensure the manufacturing industry is prepared to meet the demands of tomorrow.

www.automate-uk.com/