Demand is strong and travel is part of the reason why. Manufacturers are short of the people who install, program and maintain automated systems, and those systems sit in factories, warehouses and plants spread across the country. Make UK reports that in 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term manufacturing vacancies, costing around £6 billion in lost output every year. When engineers are scarce, employers ask each person to cover more ground.
The wider technical labour market is tight too. The Office for National Statistics found that in August to October 2025 the largest volume increase in vacancies was in professional, scientific and technical activities, up by 5,000. Automation sits right in that band, which means employers competing for the same people often stretch a patch to attract candidates who might otherwise look elsewhere.
There is a lot of room for that demand to grow. Make UK notes the UK ranks just 24th in global robotics density, with digital investment potentially adding £150 billion to GDP by 2035, and separately reports only 101 industrial robots per 10,000 workers in 2020, well behind international peers. As more sites automate, more engineers travel to keep the new kit running.
Travel scales with the shape of the job. A plant-based controls engineer might barely leave one site. A field service or commissioning engineer, by contrast, can spend most of the week visiting customer sites, sometimes staying over when a machine build or a line upgrade runs across several days. The more specialist the skill, the wider the geography an employer will ask someone to cover, because there simply are not many people who can do the work.
The skill mix is shifting too, which changes what a visit involves. Make UK found 59% of manufacturers cite automation and 50% cite wider digitalisation as trends reshaping jobs and skills, with 74% expecting demand for cognitive skills to rise by 2030. Remote diagnostics and connected machines mean some faults now get fixed without a car journey, so on-site trips increasingly focus on installation, commissioning and complex repairs rather than routine checks.
Employers are also building these skills in-house. Make UK's 2026 survey shows 40% of manufacturers plan to upskill their existing workforce for redeployment as automation and digitalisation spread, and larger firms are keenest. That matters for travel: a business growing its own engineers can plan patches around where its people actually live, rather than asking every hire to roam.
Start by being honest in the advert. Say whether the role is single-site, multi-site or national, give a typical daily radius in minutes rather than miles, and be clear about overnight stays and how often they happen. Vague wording like "some travel" loses good applicants who cannot tell whether that means one hour a week or four nights away. Concrete detail helps the right person say yes quickly.
Then match the patch to the labour supply. The pool of qualified engineers is finite and getting harder to reach at the start of a career: techUK reports a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing the toughest market since 2018. If you widen a patch too far you shrink your applicant pool; if you keep it tight you may need to grow talent yourself. Apprenticeships are one route, and GOV.UK data shows they have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025.
Finally, plan for the long game. Government projections estimate a net change of roughly 696,000 to 1,072,000 AI-related jobs, with replacement demand above 3 million, and the UK has committed to upskilling 7.5 million workers in essential AI skills by 2030. Design travel expectations you can sustain, because the engineers you hire today will be even scarcer, and more valuable, tomorrow.
When you know the travel a role really needs, the next job is finding people who match it. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. It is free for the people looking for work. Tell us the patch and the skills, and we will start shortlisting today.
