In this first podcast episode exploring the skills gap in the sector, Samantha spoke with Mhairi Brown from Skyland Aviation about the engineering and manufacturing skills crisis and why we need collaborative solutions before it’s too late. Watch the video below, listen to the podcast on your favourite player, or read the transcript below.
Listen to the podcast:
Links:
Find out more about the organisations Mhairi mentioned:
Primary Engineer
Scottish Engineering
CeeD (Centre for Engineering Education & Development)
NMIS (National Manufacturing Institute Scotland)
Transcript:
Samantha Tonge: Hello everyone. this is the first ever in the series we’re going to do on podcasts focused on skills in the engineering and manufacturing space. today I’m talking to Mhairi Brown. could you just do a brief introduction to explain who you are, and what you do?
Mhairi Brown: Hello. Thank you very much for having me on . Very excited to be here. I’m Mhairi Brown. My company is Skyland Aviation. we are a small consultancy company. Don’t let the aviation name fool you. We’re not specifically in aviation. My background is manufacturing, although I have spent quite a bit of time in MRO from an aviation point of view, our business helps businesses identify value through lean tools, looking at the culture within an organization, trying to just identify value and put in some systems and processes to allow businesses to flourish and transform.
Samantha: Fantastic. And I’m talking to you about skills because you are doing a lot of work in that area, aren’t you?
Mhairi: One of the clients that we have just now is Fife College. I’m supporting their engineering and construction department. Look at how we create better links with industry in terms of our apprenticeships, but not just thinking about industry, thinking about those wider groups that support businesses.
So businesses like Scottish Engineering, like CeeD, where Fife College are based, there’s also a Freeport in that area as well. It’s looking at how we create a framework to bring all these organizations together.From what I see just now, there are so many small pockets of great work being done.
But how effective actually is that in changing things? I did my apprenticeship 30 years ago and when I look at apprenticeships now versus then, I don’t think they’re radically different, to be honest with you. So in 30 years, what’s actually changed and what do we need to change?
Hopefully not in the next 30 years, hopefully sooner than that, because we’re talking about skills and there is a massive skills shortage in Scotland. So the Scottish Engineering reports suggests that we need 58% more engineers by 2027. .
This isn’t something that we’re thinking about in five years and 10 years, this is imminent.
As a country we’ve got a collective problem, so therefore we need a collaborative solution, and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to look at from a Fife college point of view. How can we start to make sure that we have all the right people engaged in these conversations and create a framework? That would be my ideal; that we could have a framework to support apprenticeships, colleges, and industry.
Currently, I think there’s just so many different roads to go with it. Even when you look at the apprenticeship framework delivered from SDS as well. There’s so many different types and so many different ways through that. It’s like a minefield, to be honest with you.
Samantha: Do you think that having done an apprenticeship yourself, that’s how your career started.
Do you think that gives you a different perspective that maybe other people working in the area don’t have?
Mhairi: I think it puts you in a position whereby you understand what the young people doing apprenticeships are feeling like, but then thinking about it in terms of industry as well, supporting businesses within MRO in aerospace. And again, it’s looking at what skills these businesses need of apprenticeship, not just apprentices of people as they move forward.
We’re now at the stage where we have a lot of our technical expertise coming to retirement age and leaving business . How do we then fill that gap at the front end? And I believe that schools have pushed so much for university over the years and not necessarily guiding young people towards apprenticeships, that you now have that skills deficit of real hands-on engineering technical type roles that is really missing.
And as the Scottish Engineering report suggests is sorely needed. I think it gives me a bit of an insight into a few different areas having done that apprenticeship. As to how that sets the scene moving forward. We’ll see.
Samantha: I don’t want to think about how many years, but when I was at school in England
it was the same thing; it was very much the attitude that if you don’t go to university, you’ve already failed. And that’s a terrible message.
Mhairi: Especially when there are so many routes. I’ve got three kids all in high school and my daughter’s actually just left school just now. She started fifth year and decided that school’s never been for her. She’s now actually at college, and part of the reasoning behind that was when she was in fourth year, you can do national qualifications that you can go to college on day release.
She did that last year, which opened up a different world to her, to be honest with you. So I think there are great things like that now that schools are doing, to allow young people to see different routes to things. But from my own kids’ experience, I still think there’s far too much push towards, you’ve got to go to university and not that there’s anything wrong with that, I myself went on and then did my degree later on. But I think from an engineering and technical point of view, I definitely think that is a really great way to go.
Samantha: Yeah, agreed. What struggles are you seeing colleges are facing?
Mhairi: I think funding is a big issue with them. Everyone’s affected by the cost of living just now as well, but I think funding is a big thing. If you think about engineering specific courses at colleges where we’re welding, milling, turning. The cost of material that goes into that, the cost of equipment for that, that in itself is a massive investment for colleges.
But then the funding route that comes in the backend, this is obviously something that I’ve just started recently looking at, that funding route is… I think you need to be a Philadelphia lawyer to actually try and understand how that works properly, because there are so many different routes to it as well.
Although there’s funding available, what percentage of that funding does the college actually see? Because if you think they’ve got their infrastructure, they’ve got their lecturers, they’ve got just the cost of consumables from an engineering point of view, must be massive. I think that is definitely one of the biggest challenges.
That’s obviously something that we need the government to step in. I know there are lots of great conversations happening about that just now. It’s just how quickly that can then come to fruition when we go back to the, we need 58% more engineers by next year.
Samantha: That’s a terrifying figure. Clearly we need to address it. Just thinking back to my career, I don’t know if this is still an issue and I don’t know if it’s because there weren’t the college places or because they themselves didn’t want to put the effort in, early on in my career, working at the first big corporate engineering company almost everyone over a certain age had come through an apprenticeship route. But we had a few graduate apprenticeship places, but not college apprenticeships.
Do you see that as an issue? We are not doing as much as we were 30 years ago on that front, both business and maybe the college places. I don’t know where the problem is.
Mhairi: I think certainly from an engineering point of view, the great thing about an apprenticeship is, when I think back to when I did my apprenticeship, you go round different areas of the business, so you’re not just within that one area. You build a lot of knowledge during apprenticeship as well and understanding how businesses work. I worked with Roll Royce some years ago and they had lots of modern apprenticeships, but also a graduate apprenticeship scheme; those apprentices had different routes within that business. It depends on the business really.
Back to the value conversation. Where does the business actually see value in developing? Rolls Royce, for example, had an absolutely phenomenal apprenticeship program and Rolls Royce was made up in apprentices. There was so many of them, and they’re in different places across the world, who did an apprenticeship 30 years ago within that business. I think it really depends on the value that businesses put on apprenticeships and how they want to develop young people.
Samantha: Another issue within skills in the industry is diversity. There’s a lack of diversity, I think.Casting my mind back a few weeks ago was pointed out that maybe we’re not so bad on neurodiversity in the engineering sector. Maybe those of us who are neurodiverse might even be overrepresented, but everything else, we don’t have enough diversity of thinking because we don’t have a diverse enough workforce.
Mhairi: I think diversity, the big thing for me, I get pulled into the women in engineering conversation quite often. To be honest it’s something that annoys me because I don’t think of myself as a woman in engineering; I’m just an engineer. And I think the narrative needs to change.
We need to be talking about diversity and inclusion. When you think about what is engineering? It’s problem solving. if we only have like-minded people trying to solve those problems, we won’t always get the best solution.
I was on a panel a few weeks ago at the manufacturing, and supply chain conference in Glasgow, and that was one of the things that we were actually talking about -the massive skills gap that we have. So how do we recruit 58% of people in engineering? How do we get more apprentices involved?
It’s back to the funding thing, but then thinking about it in terms of actually how do we upskill people who are currently involved in other industries into engineering. And there’s a bit, again whereby we talk about engineering, maths, and physics. That’s just what you have to have for it. And whilst I understand that from a qualification point of view, I think we’re also excluding a lot of fabulous problem solvers from being engineers because they’re maybe not really good at maths and physics.
I had to sit higher physics three times before I passed it. And it wasn’t I was bad at physics, I just fell apart whenever I went into that exam.If I hadn’t been able to get higher physics, my life today would look very different.
I think there’s a point of how we show the impact of engineering. As apprentices, we start out as one thing with a view of what we do, but when I look at my career, I’m a world away from where I was and what I’m doing when I started my career 30 years ago. So it’s been able to show young people the different routes, once you get into engineering because it’s a phenomenal career, it really is.
Samantha: Funnily enough that’s how I ended up as a marketer who works in the engineering space rather than engineer because, in England of Wales, it’s GCSEs and A levels. I sailed through my physics GCSE. A level? Ohh my word.
Mhairi: I was exactly the same. Exactly the same.
Samantha: So I went a different route. I was at the same conference that you were talking about, I was on a panel about marketing and how we help businesses in such a volatile environment. But skills came up as a question from the audience; how do we use marketing to get more young people interested in engineering? I talked about all the things I do for my clients in terms of employer branding. Paul Sheerin from Scottish Engineering who was also on the panel pointed out yes, but we have a problem with the fact that aren’t enough apprenticeships at the moment for the number of young people interested in doing apprenticeships. Which I didn’t realize was an issue, and clearly I would’ve thought that’s low hanging fruit, right? That’s step one.
Mhairi: Yep. We’ve got the numbers for SMEs; for every apprenticeship role we have 17 applicants. When that goes to larger organizations, it can be 35 people for every one apprenticeship place When you think about it in terms of that, you go, well, it’s not attracting people to it, because if we’ve got all these people applying, then they clearly are attracted to it in the first place.
It’s then how do we have that funding available, which is one thing, but then how do we have places available as well? If you think about colleges historically, they’re not very agile because they’re bound by lots of rules and regulations and the Scottish qualification authority also. I think we’re almost in a dangerous place just now where we go, right, we need 58% more engineers.
One, how do we get them? Two, how do we fund them? And then three, how do we create the capacity to actually teach them, which I think is going to be the challenge again, that’s why I think we need a collaborative solution. This problem affects the whole industry, affects the country. So how do we make sure that we put all the right people together and create a framework that we can provide the solution that we need moving forward?
It’s so urgent. On that panel I was hosting a few weeks ago, I started the chat off are we actually too late? And I know that sounds quite negative, however, how do we get ourselves in that position?
So if we think about the statistic that Scottish Engineering have said is 58% of engineers by the end of 2027, the expectation is that three quarters of those come from apprenticeships. So the other quarter, where do those people come from? Is that other industry? How do we upscale, how do we keep programs agile, that can react quickly, to deliver the number of skilled people we need?
Samantha: Wow, I didn’t realise it was three quarters. That’s a huge number we need.
Mhairi: It’s a massive number, isn’t it?
Samantha: And maybe some of the answer is the lack of places. It’s not just apprenticeships. Graduates are finding it hard to find places as well. And we lose them to the finance industry loves engineering graduates.
Mhairi: Right.
Samantha: Maybe we need to find a way to bring them back because they obviously did engineering because they love engineering. How do we encourage them back into the sector?
Mhairi: I guess it’s understanding why they’ve left isn’t it? So are there no opportunities then available for their degree when they’ve left, do they have to move away from home and they don’t want to move away from home? it’s trying to understand, the dynamics, then they feel that they need to move industry.
Samantha: There’s a lot more research to be done, I think.
Mhairi: Definitely.
Samantha: Is there any more businesses in the industry, really need to be doing to think about the skills gap?
Mhairi: I think there’s a few different things. it’s very dependent on where you are as a business, the size of your business. I’m working with a small MRO just now, and they’re very small. under 30 people. they don’t have apprentices in their business currently. It is an aspiration that they absolutely have growing your own talent.
There is no better thing than actually doing that. However, as a business, they’re just not ready and prepared for apprentices yet. part of what I’m helping them do is create that foundation and get the processes and systems in place so that then when they do start looking at apprenticeships, you can actually support these young people in the way that they absolutely need supported.
there’s a brilliant book that I like just now and it’s Atomic Habits by James Clear. there’s a quote in the book that says, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, which is so apt. So it’s how, again, thinking about the apprenticeships. How can we engineer a system?
We are problem solvers. We’ve invented so many things in this world. As engineers, there is an impact and most things that you touch on a daily basis had some sort of engineering impact. So when we think about what we do, surely to goodness we can engineer a system that actually support apprenticeships and businesses to try and reduce that skills gap.
Samantha: I imagine the easier route lot of the time, if you can find someone, is to find someone with the skills to hit the ground running. Because it takes resources to train someone, but if we don’t do it, there won’t be any existing people with skills we can just hire.
Mhairi: Exactly. And even if you think about apprenticeship programs as well, when apprentices are out in industry, they need a buddy, a trade person that they can be supported by as well, that they can be learning off of. And whereby 20 or 30 years ago, these skilled people were in abundance, they’re not so much now because they’re now retiring. how do we then think differently from that point of view? Is there something else we can do moving forward to be that person to support our apprentices within industry?
I don’t know the answer. I just think we need to start thinking outside the box and start looking at things differently.
Samantha: Maybe we need to target some retired people to help train apprentices.
Mhairi: How do we look at this and think about the best thing to do, as we move forward?
Samantha: We are going to have to think, yeah. The figures are such that we can’t just carry on doing what we’ve been doing, we’ve got to do something different, haven’t we?
Mhairi: We definitely do. you think about industry in Scotland, shipbuilding is booming in Scotland and it’s on a massive growth trajectory. You think about energy, again, it’s growing. Aerospace in Scotland as well. So there’s lots of phenomenal opportunities. How do we make sure that we can align everything to see these opportunities properly fulfilled?
Samantha: There’s so many amazing things going on in manufacturing in Scotland.
It really is a fantastic place for manufacturers. we’re probably in a key position in the UK to do something.
Mhairi: Fife College have got the first Net Zero Sustainable Building – education building – if ever there’s a case of showing the impact of what engineering and construction can do, it’s right there in front of you and all these young people are going to be moving into this campus over the next couple weeks, what a brilliant learning environment to be in.
Samantha: that’s fantastic. Renewable Energy and Net zero in general, we are very much ahead of the game in the UK in Scotland.
Mhairi: Yeah. it’s just making sure that we continue. Or at least keep up with it.
Samantha: One thing that kept coming up at the conference in Glasgow that we were talking about, what kept popping into my head is what can we do as marketers to help? Because we’ve got a certain skillset that maybe we need to be getting certain messages out to some of the target audiences to help the situation. I know a lot of people who’d be listening to these podcasts will be in marketing.
What can marketers do to use our skills to address the skills gap? And I’m going to ask in three areas. Educators that include school, colleges, universities, et cetera.
Mhairi: Back to again what we’ve seen earlier where there’s some brilliant initiatives out there.
There’s, A company called The Primary Engineer. And what The Primary Engineer do is they’ve recognized that by age 14 I think the number is, kids have almost already formed what they want to do. So if you’re talking to kids and they’re actually going to set their national fives, they’re already too late.You need to be talking to them earlier. The Primary Engineer actually do that, and they’re in primary schools trying to engage kids in STEM and engineering activities. Which is great, but how do you then continue that through? By the time you get to high school, you still have quite old opinions of what you should and shouldn’t do.
I’m going to give you a really good example of this. I’ve got twin boys and they’re both doing Nat five standard grade physics just now. One of the teachers had said there’s quite a lot of girls in this physics class this year, but that’s just ’cause teachers quite handsome.
So when you think about these are people teaching our children. I don’t want my kids to think about, oh, they don’t wanna pick in physics because that teacher’s handsome. No, they’re picking physics because they want to do physics because they enjoy it and because there’s career progression that they see with it.
We’ve got The Primary Engineer in primary schools, but then what are we doing from a high school point of view? Allow that understanding of what’s actually available out there. It’s not just university. There are lots of brilliant college courses and they should be open to everyone, not just historically we’re just going to let the boys go into physics’.
From a school’s point of view, it’s raising that awareness. So from a marketing point of view, I don’t wanna hark back to the manufacturing conference again, but on the panel that I was on, there was a wonderful woman, Joyce Onuonga from John White and Sons that was one of the questions we were talking about, about engagement.
And Joyce made the point of you need to show people the impact of things. So again, from a kid’s point of view, how do you show them the impact? Listen, maybe it’s TikTok videos, maybe it’s Instagram. How do you then just think about ‘ this is what’s available to you’, and it’s not all engines dark and dingy and dirty, and you’re going to get your hands dirty and you’re going to have to wear steel toecap boots. It’s just showing what else is available.
Samantha: Kids aren’t looking at LinkedIn and I’m not sure teachers are either.
Mhairi: So how do you actually, get that point across to them? From a marketing point of view, it’s thinking about it in those terms.
Samantha: What should we be doing towards industry? I guess how fabulous it is to have apprentices.
Mhairi: I think businesses understand importance of apprentices, but they don’t always have the funding to employ them. I don’t know what we can do from a marketing point of view. I think it’s more, the marketing should be involved at lobbying the government and STS for funding.
Samantha: That was going to be my next question. What should we do to market it to the government?
Mhairi: I think those two gel together. Especially when it comes to SMEs. Lots of small businesses are just trying to get through the day, get through the week, get through the month. There’s an investment in apprenticeships although that investment will pay off, it’s then showing that development as well.
If you go ‘right, you’ve got a four year apprenticeship. At the end of that apprenticeship, you’re going to get a job’. But for me, it’s not just a job, it’s a career. How do you then show that career progression? Sometimes that can be quite difficult in a small business because it literally is a small business,there’s not lots of opportunity for that development. So I think there’s a bit of trying to look at how you can show apprentices coming out the other end and show businesses what that development actually looks like.
Samantha: Is there any funding that businesses may not be aware of that we should be communicating to them? Or is it just not there?
Mhairi: There’s funding there, but it’s how much.This is something that I’ve recently started looking at myself and there’s quite a few different funding routes. I know that there is some work going on lobbying the government to get more support for businesses, to give them incentives to take on more apprentices. But again, I think that’s just going to be a timing thing.
Samantha: I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Mhairi: It’s a massive problem, but again, how do we as engineers go ‘right, okay. It’s an issue. As engineers we’re problem solvers’. How do we then engineer that system to allow us to support the goal that we actually have?
Samantha: This is a huge area, but I really want to do my best to do what I can because I’m very passionate about it and I see that we need to increase the diversity.
I knew there was a huge skills gap, but I don’t think I appreciated the full uh, enormity of the problem.
Mhairi: Yeah, definitely. And listen, I work within the industry and I didn’t realize that either. It’s actually crazy when you properly start looking at it. How do we fill that gap as much as possible, but equally as importantly, how do we make sure that this doesn’t happen again?
Samantha: That’s a really good point. It’s well and good, get loads of apprentices and then 30 years down the line, we haven’t thought about succession planning again.
Mhairi: That’s why I think we need to create that system. It supports that. I’m almost putting a sticking plaster on my problem just now, right? I’m going to get my 58% of people by hook or by crook. But I’m then not thinking about, well, if I don’t continue to do something, I’m going to end up in this position again in five years and 10 years time.
Samantha: That is an excellent point. There was a point where, post-war in particular, for many decades after that, we knew we needed to improve skills. We were putting all this effort in and then, I don’t know when it stopped.
Mhairi: And that’s the thing isn’t it, is almost like trying to do root cause analysis. So you’re going right where did my problem begin? Because I think understanding that, is going to help you prevent that happening in the future again.
Samantha: That’s great engineering terminology to look at the problem. It’s great to hear from you and that unique perspective coming from having been through an apprenticeship yourself. That’s been really helpful. Thank you so much.
Mhairi: You’re very welcome. I think the more people we can have talking about this and trying to actively change the narrative, then the better.
Samantha: Absolutely, and I’ll try my best.
Mhairi: Thank you for taking up the cause as well.
Samantha: No problem.
Mhairi: But if there’s anything else I can support with or anything at all, just please give a shout.
I’m happy to get involved.
Samantha: I will put your details everywhere this goes out. I will make sure that your details are available so people can contact you for more information. And thank you everyone for listening or watching.
Mhairi: Thanks so much.
Samantha: Thank you.