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A new report from the Engineering and Technology Board gives stark evidence that the UK must do more to attract people into graduate engineering jobs, and other highly skilled positions in manufacturing and industry.
The report says that over the next seven years our home-grown engineering sector must find over half a million people to fill engineering jobs for graduates, post graduates and apprentices. And that looks like it could well be a tough ask since the number of new engineers coming into the workplace at the moment is running at around just 40,000 a year. And even then, many of those new additions lack the higher level skills needed to fill graduate engineering jobs.
The report stresses that the UK has the potential to gets some balance back in the economy by using its strong manufacturing base. But, it also warns that there is a 30% fall in engineering, technology and manufacturing lecturers and a 17% decline in the rate of students coming from colleges into production and manufacturing degrees at university. The report says that these “shortages of new engineers - and of the further education lecturers to train them - could seriously jeopardise [economic rebalance], impacting on successful British industries including manufacturing, aerospace and construction."
The chief executive of the Engineering and Technology board, Paul Jackson, said: "Manufacturing is incredibly important to the UK, and engineering important to manufacturing. The question is whether we are doing enough soon enough."
Even now we’ve got a range of graduate engineering job vacancies on the e4s website - but it’s encouraging to hear this report urging that more must be done in the next few years to increase the number of highly-skilled and graduate jobs in engineering out there.
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