If one subject is certain to crop up perennially like a bad penny, it’s the UK skills shortage and, yes, it’s in the news again. Last week, the Learning and Skills Council revealed the results of a survey of no less than 79,000 employers and, as you’ve probably guessed, it doesn’t make for happy reading.
Apparently, just eight per cent of the UK’s engineering workforce gained nationally recognised qualifications in the past year and something approaching a fifth of the sector’s survey respondents is reporting significant skills gaps. Indeed, almost a third of all vacancies in the sector remain unfilled. That there are such vacancies to be filled is, in a perverse sort of way, encouraging - a view that another, more optimistic survey that crossed my desk last week would appear to support.
Take the business headlines too seriously and you might be forgiven for thinking that all is doom and gloom, no matter what sector you happen to be working in. Not so, says the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). The engineering sector is apparently rather optimistic about the future, according to the Institution’s latest survey, with big businesses reporting very positively about their recruitment plans.
The civil engineering sector leads the IET survey of 400 companies, and this is the least surprising considering that it will have its work cut out finding people of the right calibre for huge projects like Crossrail and the 2012 Olympics infrastructure. Electricals and electronics are not too far behind, with well over two thirds of companies planning to recruit this year – mostly from the UK, though the European Union remains an important skills pool.
While these recruitment campaigns seem to fly in the face of economists’ current predictions, the fact that they tend to be symptomatic of an acute skills shortage should not escape us. With its survey to hand, the IET might be feeling rather smug about the buoyancy of the sector, but it still has a lot of ground to cover helping to raise the profile of engineering and technology in schools and ensure a good crop of young recruits for the future.
Interestingly the gender of that group of recruits may be shifting. According to Annette Williams, director of the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET (Science, Engineering and Technology), this year’s A Level results clearly indicate that more girls are taking SET related subjects – and outperforming their male counterparts into the bargain.
But as Ms Williams points out, of the 600,000 women in the UK with SET qualifications, just a quarter of this group is actually working in the field. Over half of the group is working in entirely unrelated sectors and a sobering 90,000 SET-qualified women are not employed at all. At a time of acute skills shortages, these statistics reveal a shocking waste of talent.
For those young women with good SET related A Levels, the world appears to be their oyster, but they will have to weigh up their chances of career advancement in a male-dominated sector before they are attracted by SET related university courses and eventually SET related careers.
Les Hunt
Editor
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