Manufacturing is already short of people before a single furnace is electrified. 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's Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. That gap is the backdrop to every decision a plant makes about new technology.
Employers feel it most at the point of recruitment. Skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) are manufacturers' top barriers to growth, as Barclays Corporate's research on skills shortages in UK manufacturing sets out. When you switch to electric process heat, you are hiring into an already tight market, so getting the brief right matters more than ever.
Electrifying heat moves a plant away from combustion engineering and towards power, controls and data. That tracks a wider shift: six in ten (59%) manufacturers cited automation and half (50%) cited wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030, Make UK's 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap report found. Electric heat is one of the clearest examples of that change on the plant floor.
The hard-to-fill roles are exactly the ones electrification needs. 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 skills statistics. Think electrical engineers, controls and instrumentation technicians, and process engineers who understand both energy and the product coming out the other end.
Not every answer is an external hire. 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, and that figure increases for firms with more than 1,000 employees, Make UK's Executive Survey 2026 reports. Your combustion engineers often hold deep process knowledge worth retraining around the new technology.
Start with the brief, not the job title. Electric process heat blends disciplines, so write the role around the capabilities you actually need: power electronics, PLC and SCADA controls, thermal process knowledge and the digital literacy to read the data. Vague adverts for a generic 'maintenance engineer' will miss the people who can run an induction or resistance heating line.
Then split the problem. Decide which skills you can grow internally through redeployment and which you must bring in from outside. With 40% of manufacturers already planning to upskill existing staff for exactly this reason per Make UK's Executive Survey 2026, map your current team first, then recruit only for the genuine gaps. That keeps hard-won process knowledge inside the plant.
Speed protects you here. When 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles according to the IET's 2025 figures, a slow process loses the few qualified people to faster competitors. Shorten the time between a strong application and a booked interview, and you win more of the right hires.
This is where we help. We search a database of 15 million candidates to find the electrical, controls and process engineers your electrified lines need, rank a shortlist for you and keep the process moving so scarce talent does not slip away. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If electric process heat is reshaping who you hire, tell Reed.ai the capabilities you need and we will surface the people who match.
