This seems to be across all industries, with manufacturing and the oil industry among others complaining about ageing workforces and the problems of recruiting the right type of people.
So, how exactly do you find the people your industry needs?
With 87 per cent of mechanical engineering firms struggling to find the people they need, companies are adopting three main strategies to get round the problem: half the companies increased their 2008 training budgets, a third employ foreign workers and another third offer apprenticeships.
According to 'Skills and Qualifications' a report from the Engineering and Machinery Alliance (EAMA) half the apprenticeships, run by SMEs as well as big companies, are fully company funded. Half the sector run annual training programmes for their skilled workers. A third do the same each year for all their people.
“Clearly the sector is, despite what one hears, doing quite a bit about the skills shortage, tackling it in a practical way to solve immediate problems,” says Martin Walder, EAMA’s newly elected chairman. “We need to ask government to keep this immediate problem in mind too as they launch their major initiative to make the whole economy more skills competitive.”
With only a third of firms aware of the level of support government is prepared to introduce to raise sector skills levels longer term, the report concludes that there is an important communications job to be done to make sure that firms are aware of what is on offer and that government is clear about the sector’s practical needs.
“To outsiders the skills and training sector has become characterised by its complexity," explains Walder. “The associated jargon makes communication difficult. In the report we highlight the companies’ strongly expressed view that they want simple, direct information about what’s available and that trade associations could play a helpful and supportive role, particularly in sectors like ours where SMEs play such an important role.”
'Skills and Qualifications, mechanical engineering firms’ perspectives on skills and training and government’s role' can be viewed or downloaded from EAMA’s website at www.eama.info under publications.
Hopefully, this initiative should make finding the support for training easier resulting in a reduction in the skills shortage. However, a larger part of the problem is in schools where science subjects are not being studied. This is then being carried through to universities where media studies are more popular than traditional engineering and science subjects.
The challenge is to make science and technology more attractive and to educate to provide industry with the skills they need rather than to just pass exams.
Ideas please?
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