Vacancies cost economy £35m
HARD-TO-FILL vacancies in the engineering sector are costing the North East economy an estimated £35m a year in lost productivity, but giving a new lease of life to retired professionals who are being tempted back into the workplace to fill a skills gap.
According to new research from Semta, the skills council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies, which has an operations base at Billingham, 28% of local engineering firms have skill gaps - significantly higher than the national average of 21%.
The news comes as employers are being urged to stave off the economic downturn by improving the skills of their workforce with assistance through the Productivity and Competitiveness (PAC) programme.
According to the report, Engineering Skills Balance – North East, the primary reason cited for the skills gap was a lack of applicants with the required qualifications. It said 8% of engineering employees had no qualifications and many more were under-qualified for their roles.
Seventeen per cent of engineering firms had vacancies which were proving difficult to fill between March 2006 and 2007, while the number of recruits needed between 2008 and 2014 was likely to reach 11,000, or 1,850 a year.
Philip Whiteman, chief executive of Semta, said: “The results of our research show that there are still significant skills shortages in the North-east that need to be filled. This highlights that programmes like PAC are essential in enabling UK companies to compete globally. The benefits of PAC are clear and quantifiable and can have a huge impact on the bottom line of small to medium sized businesses.”
The PAC programme, developed by Semta and funded through the LSC, is a new National Skills Academy for Manufacturing course set up by engineers with experience in lean process and manufacturing. It is being aimed specifically at smaller businesses, which make up 90% of the North-east engineering sector. SEMTA said it had already helped companies to increase their profitability by an average of £93,000 per year.
Phill Thomas, business services director of specialist engineering recruitment firm Roevin, based at Wilton, which will have placed 2,500 primarily white-collar engineers this year, said finding suitably qualified recruits was a “huge problem”. Short-term, the gap was being filled by recently retired, highly qualified professionals returning to fill contract positions.
The average age of engineering staff placed by Roevin was 50-55, and that was likely to remain the case for another five to seven years, said Mr Thomas, while a new cohort of graduates made its way through the system. Meanwhile, firms would have to make better use of extended training programmes, many supported by external funding, said Mr Thomas. Recruiting from overseas was not always the solution, he said.
“There are a lot of problems matching up the qualifications, then there’s the language barrier and the skills shortage is worldwide, so in a sense, we are just moving the problem around the world.”
Semta recently announced a new £65m partnership with the Government to deliver urgently required skills.
