Out-Law News 2 min. read
30 Jul 2013, 4:04 pm
In an interview with the Independent, Keith Lewis of engineering recruitment specialists Matchtech said that the shortage would inevitably push up labour costs on the projects. He said that the Government had to do more to encourage young people to take up engineering as a profession.
"Clearly, there is a monetary impact with a number of programmes running concurrently," Lewis told the newspaper. "The reality is we have an aging workforce and the task is how we get more youth into engineering."
"There's not enough work done on making engineering a career of choice. There is a difference between perception and reality - people still see engineering as being an oily rag and blue overcoat," he said.
There are currently 2,500 vacancies being advertised through Matchtech according to Lewis, which he said was evidence that demand for highly qualified engineers is outstripping supply. The Independent said that around 100,000 new engineers and scientists will be needed over the next three years just to replace those who have retired. The Crossrail project is about to enter its heaviest construction phase, while work on the new national HS2 high speed rail line is due to begin in 2017.
The Government published a 'pipeline' of long-term infrastructure investment priorities, worth approximately £100 billion, at the end of last month. The proposals followed the Chancellor's allocation of £50bn to capital spending in 2015/16 as part of this year's Spending Round.
Projects expert Patrick Twist of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that it "should come as no surprise" that there was a lack of highly-trained engineers in the UK.
"As manufacturing has supplied an ever-smaller part of UK GDP so employment in the sector has failed to grow and the workforce has aged," he said. "The rewards available in the service sector, and especially in finance, have vastly outstripped those in manufacturing and many of the brightest graduates - even those with science and engineering degrees – have gone into law, investment banking or finance."
"Changing the direction of a super-tanker which has been gaining momentum over thirty years isn't going to happen overnight, but the esteem in which engineers are held is starting to change. No doubt it will be the case that we will see a shortage of people with the right skills initially; but the cause of the shortage is the proposed investment infrastructure, and that can only be welcomed," he said.
Twist said that it was "wrong" for Matchtech's Keith Lewis to "conflate Crossrail and HS2", as the projects would "run consecutively, not together".
"By 2017, as Crossrail comes to completion, work will start to ramp up on HS2 which will run for a decade," he said. "This is precisely what the supply chain needs, so that it can plan for the future knowing that it will need a skilled rail-building workforce for approaching 20 years. This will allow sensible long-term planning, training and recruitment to take place. The increase in demand for engineering skills may well give rise to short-term inflationary pressures, but overall that increased demand is good news and we should not be fearful of it."
In addition, Twist said that if the shortage of qualified engineers drove up salaries in the engineering sector "that of itself will help to encourage younger people to pursue a career in engineering".
"Government plans for infrastructure are rightly derided for the propensity to re-announce the same project at regular intervals, but there can be no doubt that those plans set out a long-term commitment to investment which can only give comfort to young men and women looking to make a career in the sector," he said.
