Why are engineering firms struggling to recruit graduates?

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Britain is being held back by a major shortage of science and engineering students, or so we are told on what seems like an increasingly frequent basis. Yet ask most recent graduates whether they’ve found it easy to get a job in engineering and they’ll probably tell you that competition is fierce. To explore what’s really going on in graduate recruitment and to try to identify some possible solutions, The Engineer convened a roundtable panel from across the engineering community. The discussion covered the reasons behind the skills mismatch what can be done to address it, but began with an examination of how widespread the problem actually is.

The picture that quickly emerged was of an uneven jobs market, in which large, well-known firms have both the natural pull and the marketing budgets to attract huge numbers of applications, leading many graduates to end up fighting over the same few jobs. The smaller companies, meanwhile, especially those in more rural locations and less well-understood product areas, struggle to get enough applicants just to fill their roles, let alone compete for the best engineers. ‘It’s a huge problem,’ said Bob Gregory, training manager for medium-sized precision manufacturer HepcoMotion. ‘We are in a fairly rural and remote part of Devon and there’s a lot of reluctance among graduates to relocate to where we are.’

The problem is even more severe when it comes to more specialised skills such as nuclear engineering, where the problem also starts to affect the larger firms. Geoff McFarland, group engineering director of Renishaw, explained how the company was forced to divest its acquired MRI equipment division after failing to find people with the right expertise to take it forward. ‘The only ones available were from overseas,’ he said.