How to solve the engineering skills crisis
From our UK edition
UK engineering is facing an insidious threat to its success – a chronic failure to get enough young people to become the engineers and skilled technicians we need. Post-Brexit, the UK is likely to face greater challenges than before in recruiting enough professional engineers and technicians to meet industry’s needs. As engineering contributes 20% of the UK’s gross value added (GVA), it is vitally important for our future prosperity and economic growth that we address this problem as soon as possible. So what can we do to plug the skills gap? One of the biggest barriers to the uptake of engineering as a career is how it is perceived. If you look up ‘engineer’ in Google images, you will see page after page of pictures of men in hard hats.
