Demand is real, but so is the strain. In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year Make UK – Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. That gap tells you two things at once: employers want to grow, and they cannot find the people to do it. Investment goods, the machinery, equipment and capital products that other businesses buy to expand, sit right at the centre of that pull.
The pressure is broad. Manufacturers name skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) as their top barriers to growth Barclays Corporate – Skills shortage in UK Manufacturing. When three of the biggest brakes on growth are all about people, hiring stops being an HR task and becomes a business strategy.
Engineering is where the squeeze bites hardest. 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Those are exactly the roles that investment goods makers rely on to design, build and maintain capital equipment.
The demand is also structural, not a blip. Occupations in digital, adult social care, construction and engineering have the greatest additional employment demand between 2025 and 2030 GOV.UK - Assessment of priority skills to 2030 (Skills England). And the shape of the work is shifting fast: six in ten (59%) manufacturers cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, while 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030 Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. In plain terms, factories need people who can run and improve automated systems, not just operate a single machine.
Start by treating recruitment and retention as one job. With skills shortages, recruitment and retention ranked as the top three barriers to growth Barclays Corporate – Skills shortage in UK Manufacturing, filling a role badly just moves the problem a few months down the line. Write specs around the skills the work actually needs now, then move quickly, because the best engineers rarely stay on the market for long.
Build a route from outside and inside. Hiring solves part of the gap, but 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, and that figure rises for firms with more than 1,000 employees Make UK Executive Survey 2026. The firms pulling ahead pair fast, well-targeted hiring with a clear plan to grow the people they already have.
You need to move at the speed the sector now demands. A recruitment agent that searches a database of 15 million candidates can find engineers, technicians and operators who match the skills your specs actually call for, and manage the process end to end. 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. Ready to fill your next factory role? Tell us what you need and let's get started.
