Businesses need to invest in skills

For a problem that first gained widespread recognition in the late 1990s, very little seems to have been done to alleviate the situation. So little, in fact, that we now find ourselves in the perfect storm of an ageing workforce with up to 20% of engineers approaching retirement, 'leakage' where graduates choose non-engineering careers, and not enough new students choosing to study engineering.

At the same time, the UK is experiencing a worryingly high level of NEETS - Not in Education, Employment, or Training - in the 16 to 24 age range. This is something that Enginuity, the former Sector Skills Council for engineering and manufacturing, feels could be rectified by closing the skills gap, and is reflected in its recently published report, which finds that the skills gap in the engineering and manufacturing sector is costing the UK more than £ 5bn a year.

The report, titled Mind the Gap, asserts that the sector faces many interrelated factors which will only make matters worse over time. The £5bn lost annually to skills shortages represents a major missed opportunity.

Based on typical starting salaries in the sector, it would be equivalent to supporting over 300,000 apprenticeships each year – a scale of intervention that could materially reduce the number of NEETs by 30% and thus help to reduce the UK's benefits bill.

Of course, this makes perfect sense. However, the reality is that there are still way too few businesses in the sector offering opportunities to young or newly qualified people. I understand that Government support for apprenticeships is woefully inadequate, but there seems to be a huge reluctance to train and invest in workforces across much of the UK's industrial sector. Businesses want skilled workers, but want someone else to put the money, time and effort into training them. There are record numbers of graduates out of work, including engineering graduates, yet we constantly hear that engineering companies are having difficulty recruiting. What is going so wrong here?

Like many things, the skills crisis is a complicated issue that will not be solved by any one measure, however, if more businesses started to recruit into graduate or entry-level roles and took on responsibility for training, maybe things wouldn't look quite so bleak.

Charlotte Stonestreet

Editor