In the latest virtual breakfast morning from the Made in Group members gathered to share their thoughts on recruitment and skills in manufacturing. Multiple participants were interested in talking about the topic. For this session, held on 25th January 2023, the discussion was split into two groups. The first was held by Karen Tinkler, Director of Partners Group - patron of Made in Yorkshire.
We all have to take responsibility for attracting the right people and skills into manufacturing
The main theme of the discussion was about looking ahead, planning ahead, and investing now in developing the right future talent for your business.
Finding the right people with the right skills takes time – either to recruit externally or develop from within a business. Harvard Business School says it takes a minimum of four years to put a successful medium term succession plan in place, but a lot of manufacturers don’t look this far ahead.
Many manufacturers have had a challenging few years, and teams have reduced in size. In businesses that are already short on staff, it’s hard to find people you can train from within to take on more senior roles over time or even make sideways moves to address current skills shortages.
An accelerated graduate programme is one option, bringing someone into the business in a junior position and seeing how they develop and cope with responsibility. Lean Apprenticeships can help to match or cover a specific role – these are essentially “fast track” apprenticeships that are bespoke to a particular job role.
You can’t just sit back and let things happen – you have to put the effort in if you want to get the right people into your business. That could be through apprenticeships and if you’re dealing with young people who’ve never worked before, it’s important to invest in the pastoral side. 16-year-olds who have never worked will need help adjusting to working life. Having someone in the business with this responsibility as part of their role gives your apprenticeships more chance of succeeding. It also helps make sure you give people the right skills and retain more of the trainees you take on.
Retention is a big issue - keeping the right people and skills in your business is a challenge, and it’s important for manufacturers to work hard to keep their teams engaged and motivated. Offering career progression opportunities is key, so that people can see they have a future in that business and can work their way up the scale.
We should all be looking ahead: a lot of manufacturing businesses are recruiting for today’s problems and have missed the boat. All of our businesses are very different to where they were five years ago, and we need to be looking five years ahead to identify the skills we will need so we can start finding and nurturing people those skills now.
Not enough manufacturing businesses are making the time to engage with colleges and universities. We all have a responsibility to give young people the information they need to make informed judgements about working in the manufacturing sector. We are the ones responsible for mapping out career opportunities and we should all be engaging more with young people via schools, colleges, universities and training providers to let them know what skills our businesses need, now and in the future. We need to create more opportunities for young people to talk to people in our industry to help them understand what a career in manufacturing can offer. More of us need to open our doors to young people and “blast some myths” about the industry.
Made in the Midlands and Made in Yorkshire is an ideal vehicle for facilitating this, we should be focusing collectively on how we can open our doors to more young people to help get more of them into the industry. Between us as a group we have much more muscle than as individual businesses – how can we leverage this?
