As simple as that
The new Enginuity Future Skills Hub is a great resource for Britain's engineering and manufacturing businesses. Combined with sustainability mindsets it could be job done. Well, nearly.
We’re delighted to announce the launch of Enginuity’s new Future Skills Hub, built in partnership with The Green Edge.
The engineering sector is a critical part of the future of the UK’s economy, generating nearly one-third of its output. According to the Royal Academy of Engineering, across the UK there are over 8 million engineers employed by 720,000 business of all sizes. Around one quarter of those engineers work in R&D, with another half operating across the various fields of deployment and delivery. Almost one in five provide support of one kind or another. Together, they drive much of the emerging economies around such things as advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, AI, digital and advanced computing, bioinformatics and geonomics, photonics and quantum technologies, energy and environment technologies, and engineering biology.
Where are all these engineers? Well, we see that City Regions and Combined Authorities are important influences on the distribution of engineers of various types across Britain. London and the South East retain a strong gravitational pull on high-value engineering, mixing it up with high volume engineering cities like Leeds, thriving engineering enterprise regions like the North East and innovation-intensive areas like Cheshire with its focus on pharmaceuticals.
Image: RAEng
What does this all mean for engineering skills? Sources like Engineering UK and Lightcast show us a few distinct trends. Among the generic skill groups featured in job postings, we see that ICT and software dominates, with lesser demand in skills related to mechanical, electrical, quality assurance and regulatory, and civil. Perhaps surprisingly, skills for design and development fall below these, although when it comes to specialised skill categories, drafting and engineering design is most sought after. Meanwhile skills for the environment, energy and earth trails behind the pack.
So, that’s the here and now. But what about the future? That’s why Enginuity’s Future Skills Hub has been created, to provide snapshots and valuable pointers towards the future skills required by engineering and manufacturing firms – particularly those of the small and medium enterprise (SME) variety – and how to acquire them. And, as we describe in our post on the Hub’s new blog, we were delighted to be involved, since we regard many of those future skills as being irrevocably linked to skills for sustainability.
We are confident that the Hub will prove be an invaluable resource for engineering and manufacturing companies grappling with the question of how to skill up for the future and towards smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, sustainability and beyond. And we also regard our other recent collaboration with Enginuity, a white paper on Human Capabilities for Sustainability, to be a valuable companion piece to the Hub. Why? Because, while the technical skills described in the Hub – skills for Digital Twinning, Machine Learning, Virtual and Augmented Reality and the like – can all be learned, it’s essential that these technical competences are combined with sustainability mindsets, so that engineers can fulfil their fundamental roles in designing the solutions that will restore a sustainable world.
It's as simple – and essential – as that.