Read time: 12 mins.
Key highlights:
- Lay of the land: The state of play when it comes to recruitment in engineering.
- Through the doors: Why a £15m college campus in South Wales can be a source of inspiration around the world.
- Cause for cohesion: How collaboration can make all the difference as the industry attempts to address the skills gap.
A 17-year-old arrives for her first day of a week-long work placement at British Airways Maintenance Cardiff.
She is guided through a hangar, shown the maintenance bays, and taken into the various workshops. She is surrounded by testing equipment and inspection tools, engines and planes. She was last week, too. And the week before that. She is every day.
It is why, by the end of the week, British Airways has agreed to welcome Aimee back for another week later in the year.
For most 17-year-olds, an environment like this would be completely new, maybe even daunting. But since September 2025, Aimee has been working within an engineering facility multiple days per week.
The Coleg Gwent student has a keen interest in aerospace engineering and is working towards obtaining a pilot’s license. It has all been inspired through her studies at a new college facility in the south of Wales.
Harnessing government and council funding, Coleg Gwent launched the £15m High Value Engineering (HiVE) Centre last year to provide aspiring engineers with hands-on access to state-of-the-art robotics, aerospace, motorsport, advanced materials and manufacturing equipment.
Its primary function is to address the skills gap in Ebbw Vale and South Wales, historically an industrial hub, but perhaps it also ought to serve as inspiration to the wider manufacturing sector.
Mind the gap
Read any report relating to manufacturing and recruitment, and you will struggle to come to any other conclusion than this: there is a skills gap in manufacturing.
In the UK alone, 20% of engineers are expected to retire in the next five years, with the sector needing a million more engineers by 2030 and 1.9 million new STEM professionals by 2035. More than three-quarters of the nation’s engineering businesses are currently struggling to find the skills they need, and many engineering graduates are said to lack the practical skills required in the workplace. This is all according to the Manpower 2025 UK Talent Shortage report. Meanwhile, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s ‘Engineers 2030’ report, also published last year, suggests that although 74% of engineering employers say advanced digital skills will be critical over the next three years, only 39% are currently prioritising these for training.
The US is experiencing similar challenges. Research from the ACEC Research Institute suggests there is a net shortage of 18,000 engineers a year, while only around 9% of the 40,000 international students earning an engineering degree in 2022 secured the relevant visas to continue working in the country. Research from RS, meanwhile, suggests the number of employees in the engineering sector has been growing by around 3.5% year-on-year, but with 966,000 engineering roles advertised across the country last summer and only 141,000 engineering graduates entering the workforce each year, just 15% of those open roles could be filled by new talent every year. Figures from Deloitte state that 80% of engineering and construction executives report difficulty filling skilled roles.
These findings become more pertinent in the context of reshoring efforts in the UK, Europe and particularly the United States. As Conflux Technology founder Michael Fuller opined in a column published via TCT Magazine in July 2025, “If we want to build resilient, high-quality local manufacturing capacity, we need to invest in training, development, and continuous learning.”
“We see education, exposure, and workforce development as a fundamental pillar to bringing this technology into mainstream advanced manufacturing.”
