Demand is real, but the people are hard to find. Make UK counts 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing in 2025, a gap it links to around £6bn in lost output every year. That is not a soft market. It is a sector with orders on the books and empty seats on the floor.
Skills sit at the heart of it. Barclays Corporate found that 75% of manufacturers name skills shortages as their top barrier to growth, with recruitment (36%) and retention (32%) close behind. When three of the biggest brakes on growth are all about people, hiring well stops being an HR task and becomes a production priority.
The pressure reaches into new technology too. Make UK reports that over half of manufacturers cite skills shortages as the main barrier to AI adoption, with only 2% saying AI is widely embedded. In other words, plants cannot modernise faster than they can staff. Craft roles like finishing and coatings are part of that story: they sit alongside automation, not behind it.
Finishing and coatings covers the crafts that decide whether a product lasts and looks right. Think spray painters and powder-coating technicians, electroplaters and anodisers, surface-treatment and pre-treatment operators, blast and prep specialists, and the quality inspectors who sign off the finish. These are hands-on, judgement-heavy roles. A good sprayer reads a surface the way a decorator reads a wall, and that skill takes years to build.
Why are they hard to fill? Much of the workforce is experienced and ageing, apprenticeship pipelines are thin, and the work resists easy automation. The wider labour market shows how much hands-on demand is shifting: while general vacancies have cooled, the ONS notes that the largest volume rise in vacancies recently came in professional, scientific and technical activities, up by 5,000, a reminder that technical, specialist skills keep their pull even in a quieter market.
Apprenticeships are one route back to capacity. Across the economy, government data shows apprenticeships rising from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025. Manufacturers can apply the same logic to the shop floor: grow your own sprayers and platers rather than wait for finished ones to appear. The craft is learnable. The question is who is teaching it, and whether you can hire the experienced hands to train the next intake.
Start with the work, not the job title. Write the role around the finishes, substrates and standards you actually run, so applicants can picture the day. Vague adverts pull vague applicants. A clear one, naming the coatings, tolerances and shift pattern, pulls people who already do this and want to do it for you.
Move quickly once someone good appears. Skilled finishers rarely stay on the market long, and a slow process loses them. The KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs tracks how candidate availability and hiring conditions move month to month, and the pattern is consistent: hesitation costs you the best people. Book the interview, run a practical assessment, and decide.
Then think about retention on day one. With Barclays showing retention as a top-three barrier for a third of manufacturers, the hire is only half the job. Pair new starters with experienced crafts-people, map a progression path from operator to specialist to inspector, and protect the training time. The plants that keep their finishing talent are the ones that keep teaching it.
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