Member Article

Don’t let the region’s skills gap stunt North East engineering excellence

By Wayne Baxter, Managing Director at engineering specialists, Haden Freeman.

For decades, the North East has been celebrated for its engineering and manufacturing heritage, while today, the region continues to innovate in areas as diverse as biotechnology, specialist manufacturing and chemical engineering.

However, the region’s ability to drive this growth and continue to remain competitive on a global scale could be under threat due to an ongoing skills-gap, as fewer young people enter the engineering profession.

So how big is the problem? There are currently more than 8,500 workers in the region’s engineering and manufacturing sectors who are expected to retire by 2016, while almost three quarters of engineering companies across the North East are reporting concerns regarding a lack of qualified candidates to enable them to continue their ground-breaking work.

This means there is an ever-more limited pool of talent to go around, and further compounding this is the lure of off-shore engineering projects in the North Sea, as qualified engineers are seconded on lucrative contracts.

Clearly then, the skills gap is a real, tangible problem. Yet despite this, we have some of the most exciting developments in the industry taking place right here. And compared with more ‘fashionable’ sectors, such as marketing or media, engineering in fact offers very strong salaries for graduates, with strong career progression.

To tackle this, something needs to be done at grass roots level and the recent news of plans for the South Durham University Technical College (UTC), an engineering centre of excellence which is set to be completed by 2016, is most certainly a significant step in the right direction.

However, more can be done. Firm’s need to put much more resource into marketing themselves more effectively, communicating their achievements and tapping into the imagination of our up and coming talented engineers. Schemes such as apprenticeships are also an invaluable way of offering our potential engineers of the future.

In short, now is the time to show young people what an exciting, relevant and cutting-edge career, engineering can be.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Adam Worrall .