Skills starved executives threaten mass exodus
The 2013 Harvey Nash Manufacturing Leadership survey shows that 62% of executive staff believe they are being starved of skills and that 40% of those dissatisfied are planning to switch jobs as a result.
Sector skills organisation Semta - which helped produce the report - is urging employers to invest in training and grow their own, more loyal, talent through apprenticeships.
Semta’s current forecasts on the skills crisis facing UK manufacturing and engineering shows that industry needs to develop 363,000 of the current technical workforce who are qualified below world-class standards and to recruit and train 82,000 engineers, scientists and technologists by 2016.
Hiring staff is also proving problematic with around 10,000 hard-to-fill vacancies every year mainly due to skills shortages.
CEO of Semta, Sarah Sillars, OBE (right) said: “For the last three years business leaders surveyed have cited their top operational concerns as an inability to recruit good people and a lack of available skilled workers.
“Money may be tight right now but skills gaps and shortages impact on companies’ ability to deliver and stay competitive. It’s clear employers risk losing experienced staff unless they invest in skills. Hiring skilled workers can be expensive so we are urging employers to come to Semta. We can help them not only upskill their current workforce but also develop tomorrow’s talent through apprenticeships. Contrary to popular myth, apprentices tend to be more loyal than other staff.”
Research by Semta’s partner the National Apprenticeship Service found that 74% of employers said apprentices tended to be more loyal, remaining at their company longer than non-apprentices, while 92% said their apprenticeship programme better motivated staff and increased job satisfaction.
The report also provides an insight into how little is being done to increase the number of women working in manufacturing and engineering. Semta believes redressing the gender imbalance could help solve industry’s recruitment and skills issues.
Of those surveyed 73% said their organisation is not actively trying to increase the number of women employees within their business. Also, of the 27% who are, only 40% are looking to increase the number of women employees throughout the entire organisation, with 15% focusing purely on board level appointments and 31% focusing on senior/middle management appointments.
Sarah Sillars said: “It is puzzling that when only 20% of the sector’s workforce are female so few companies are actively trying to increase the number of women within their business. While no one is suggesting that candidates should be selected on anything other than merit, perhaps employers facing skills shortages should consider how to nurture this untapped talent.
“As this report makes clear, skills are the foundation of competitiveness. The government is encouraging employers to take ownership of skills and thankfully help is at hand not only to recruit, train and retain top talent, but also to prevent a lost generation of young people, who need enthusing to join the UK’s world-beating manufacturing industry.”
Rob Lanham, director of Harvey Nash’s Industrial Executive Search practice, fully endorses the findings of the report as being strategically alarming: “A key competitive advantage of the UK’s industrial and manufacturing base has been the combination of pioneering innovation and the exploitation of high technology manufacturing and practical expertise by a highly skilled workforce.
“It is the combination of research, development and world leading academic capability with advanced manufacturing expertise that has sharpened the competitiveness of the UK manufacturing industry and much of the talented leadership in our manufacturing client base was seeded in apprenticeships starting on the shop floor.
“As executive recruiters, we see first-hand how leadership is fundamental to a company’s success and there is no doubt apprenticeships have a key role to play; not only do the manufacturing leaders we speak to see apprenticeships as an important source of new talent for the sector, but also many of them talk about how their own experience of working on the shop floor makes them the talented leaders they are today.
“It is essential we have a strategy that continues to grow these skills from the bottom up but more importantly that we attract more talent into the sector and specifically, we harness the vast untapped resource of bringing more women into the engineering and manufacturing sectors.”
Semta supports companies to hire apprentices and graduates and can help with up skilling through The Advanced Skills Accreditation Scheme which gives access to individually accredited Master’s level modules in key technology areas, through a network of top universities, without any pre-qualifications. It also offers Career Advancement and Progression, a programme to support women's career development and tackle organisational barriers to retain high potential women.
Read the full
2013 Manufacturing Leadership Survey
