The gap is wide and it's costing real money. In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year, according to Make UK. That's not a short-term blip. It's a structural shortage that keeps good lines running below capacity.
Employers feel it most at the technical end. Barclays Corporate found manufacturers rank skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) as their top barriers to growth. When three of your biggest blockers are all about people, the hiring plan becomes the growth plan.
Engineering is tight across the board. The Institution of Engineering and Technology reports that 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills at the top of the list. Controls and automation sit right inside that squeeze.
Start with where the shortage is sharpest. GOV.UK data shows entry-level hiring in engineering has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap. Fewer people are entering the pipeline than leaving it, so the early-career tier is thinning faster than the senior tier it eventually feeds.
Automation is reshaping the work itself. Make UK found six in ten (59%) manufacturers cited automation and half (50%) cited wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, with 74% expecting demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030. Controls apprentices are exactly the people who grow into those jobs.
And many firms are already choosing to build rather than buy. Make UK's Executive Survey 2026 found 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, a figure that rises for firms with more than 1,000 employees. An apprentice intake is the same instinct, applied to new entrants.
To size the intake, map your live roles. Count the recurring controls and automation vacancies you struggle to fill externally, add expected retirements over the next three years, and factor the roles automation will create rather than remove. That total, not a round number, sets how many first-year apprentices you need.
Hire for aptitude, not finished skills. Apprentices are rising fast as a route into technical work: GOV.UK's AI Labour Market Survey 2025 shows apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025. The lesson carries across: structured, grow-your-own routes now compete with direct hiring for the best early-career talent.
Write the role around problem-solving and willingness to learn, not years of experience. Screen for logical reasoning and basic numeracy, then let your training programme and mentors build the PLC, HMI and wiring knowledge over time.
Speed matters most here. When the entry-level pipeline is thinning, the firm that replies first and books the interview first usually wins the hire.
This is where we come in. We search a database of 15 million candidates, rank a shortlist in under 30 seconds, contact matched people in under a minute and can book an interview in under three minutes, so you move at the speed a shrinking pipeline demands. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell Reed.ai the roles your apprentices will grow into, and we'll help you size and fill the intake today.
