One in five young people will need to become an engineer if the UK has any chance of addressing severe skills shortages and rebalancing the economy towards advanced manufacturing, new research has warned.
This is complete nonsense. Manufacturing is some 12 or 13% of the entire global economy.
The idea that we want to put 20% of our bright young things into something that is only 12% of the global economy, only 12% (ish) of the UK economy is just nonsense.
For if we did do that then by definition they\’d all be pretty low productivity, wouldn\’t they?
The Royal Academy of Engineering forecasts that the engineering profession needs 104,000 STEM graduates a year between now and 2020, but there are only 82,000 UK domiciled STEM graduates a year. Of those, just 64,000 end up going into engineering, meaning 40,000 extra graduates are needed annually.
And we know how to change this, don\’t we matey?
Get your member companies to raise the amount they pay engineers.
Hmm, what\’s that? You can\’t afford to do that? Then clearly people are more productive in other areas of the economy then, aren\’t they?
