This one is bigger than any single vacancy. It is about why UK manufacturing keeps hiring for the next role instead of the next decade, and what it is costing.
The skills crisis, reframed
It is strange that businesses worry about a skills crisis while they still have a retiring workforce inside the building who could be training people. The question should not be how do we bring the same skill in. It should be how do we pass the skill on. In most businesses, the skill is already there. It just needs time invested in teaching the younger generation, or anyone who wants to learn, before the people who hold it retire.
The USB stick problem
Laura jokes about wanting to put a USB stick into the head of the person retiring and download it into the person coming in. The baby boomers are heading for retirement, rightly so after working their whole lives, but the knowledge is not being passed down. Sometimes they are reluctant. More often they are simply never given the opportunity.
Meanwhile the younger generation are not coming through, because they do not see the industry as interesting. They see it as dirty, as something people do when they cannot get another job. It is a perception problem, and it needs the industry shouting about the innovative things actually happening in modern manufacturing. In Laura's view it needs to start at primary school, engaging young people with what the future of manufacturing and engineering looks like.
Why hiring stays reactive
Most manufacturing hiring is reactive because it is solving what is happening right now. Somebody hands their notice in: react, backfill. A big new contract lands: react. What businesses are not doing is future proofing. They are not planning, not understanding what is coming. They are responding to what is in front of them, over and over.
What strategic actually looks like
Take a business where six people do everything. You cannot run a business on that. Strategic hiring starts by understanding the skill sets of those six people: what they bring, what is missing, and what they are doing that they should not need to do. Then you recruit around the gaps, and around freeing your best people to do the work only they can do. A good recruitment strategy maximises who and what you already have, then solves the right problems with the right hires.
Look inside first
Whenever an opportunity opens up, look internally first. If somebody could step into it, give them the chance, because otherwise your own people think: I could have done that job and I was not even approached. And if you do need to go external, have the conversation internally. Explain why. Show people the gaps, and offer the training, support and apprenticeships to close them. There are so many tools available to businesses for developing their own people. Use them first.
The cost of not fixing it
A business that does not fix its hiring thinking ends up with a widening skills gap, too much resting on a handful of individuals, and people burning out under the load. Add in everything else pressing on the sector right now, rising energy costs, the issues within metals, the tariffs and the quotas, and it becomes a problem the business gave itself, on top of the ones it could not avoid.
The businesses that will still be strong in ten years are deciding that now. Marshall Harmony helps them decide well.