It's tight, and the pressure is structural rather than temporary. In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year Make UK's Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. That gap sits on top of an engineering labour market where 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list the Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 skills research.
Manufacturers themselves name the problem clearly. Skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) rank as the top barriers to growth Barclays Corporate's 2024 analysis of the UK manufacturing skills shortage. For a plant moving into low-carbon concrete, that means the specialist people you need are the same people everyone else is chasing.
Low-carbon concrete sits squarely inside the occupations the government expects to grow. Digital, engineering and construction occupations appear most commonly among priority occupations, many already experiencing high recruitment demand and expected to keep growing strongly Skills England's annual skills report 2026. The same picture holds over the longer run: construction and engineering occupations show some of the greatest additional employment demand between 2025 and 2030 Skills England's assessment of priority skills to 2030.
The nature of the work is changing too. Six in ten (59%) manufacturers cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as trends reshaping jobs and skills, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030 Make UK's 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap report. New low-carbon process lines need people who can run automated equipment, read data and solve problems, not just operate a single station.
Start by deciding what you build versus what you buy. 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, a figure that rises for firms with more than 1,000 employees Make UK's Executive Survey 2026. For a new low-carbon line, the fastest route is often a blend: retrain experienced operators who already know your plant, then hire externally for the specialist sustainability and engineering skills that are hardest to find the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
Then move quickly and describe roles in plain terms. When 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles the IET's 2025 research, the best people are rarely on the market for long. Write adverts around the actual tasks and the technology, widen your search beyond traditional concrete backgrounds, and keep your process short so you don't lose good applicants to slower rivals.
We built Reed.ai to make specialist manufacturing hiring faster and simpler. We search a database of 15 million candidates, rank a shortlist in seconds and handle the process end to end, from first contact to a booked interview. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you're staffing a new process today, start your search with us.
