Dr Stan Higgins, CEO of NEPIC, reflects on the urgent need for more technical apprentices in our economy.

WE heard from the CBI in May 2011 that a huge 43% of employers are now finding it difficult to recruit workers with science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills and that premium rates are now beginning to be paid for such expertise.

These results mirror the findings of the process industry in the North-east which has concluded that over the next 10 to 15 years, upwards of 16,000 technical staff will be recruited into the chemical, pharmaceutical, polymer and biotechnology industries of the North-east.

This is not a difficult thing to calculate. It comes from the demographics of our sector - the age of our workforce, and the known investment opportunities that we are currently working on. We must keep an eye on these big picture issues if we are to survive in the global economy.

The CBI survey of 566 organisations across the UK has revealed that the situation is only expected to get worse. A further 10% of respondents believed that they would also soon be experiencing hiring issues over the year ahead, making a total of 53% of companies that will struggle to find skilled and qualified staff.

To counteract this, just under a third said they were now offering STEM-related work experience in a bid to tackle the issue.

But here comes the crux of the issue - small companies (14%) professed themselves far less likely to offer apprenticeships than large ones with more than 5,000 staff (83%). and there are many times more SMEs than big companies in our economy.

Unless we get more SMEs to take on apprenticeships we are never going to meet the skills targets that a have now been set. In the survey the biggest barriers were said to be lack of financial incentives for recruiting and training personnel as well as difficulties in accessing government funding and support for such learning and development activities (56% respectively).

How have we got into such a mess? It is now clear that the decline in apprenticeships from 1960s to the 1990s is a legacy of a nation failing to understand that making stuff is more important to an economy than servicing stuff.

Putting it bluntly, making the car creates more value than arranging the finance for it. We have gone through a period where our leading politicians have poured scorn on the value of craft and technical skill, believing in the nonsense that value can only be created through graduate brain power.