The talent your make-or-buy decisions depend on is genuinely hard to find. Across the wider engineering sector, 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 research. In defence and security, where clearance requirements and niche domain knowledge narrow the field even further, that pressure is sharper still.
The pipeline problem is not evenly spread. In Engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap, according to a 2026 GOV.UK snapshot of entry-level hiring. That gap matters: fewer junior engineers coming through today means fewer experienced engineers to carry technical judgement tomorrow. And most of that judgement has to be grown at home, because the vast majority of new engineering hires come from the resident labour force, indicating low reliance on international recruitment, according to GOV.UK's review of professionals in IT and engineering.
A make-or-buy decision, choosing whether to build a component or capability in-house or source it from a supplier, is really a technical judgement dressed as a commercial one. It needs someone who understands the design, the tolerances, the integration risk and the certification path. In defence and security, that someone is almost always a senior engineer, and their time is the scarcest resource you have.
The squeeze is about to get worse. 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, according to recruitment firm Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report surveying over 500 employers and 1000 candidates, reported by Engineering and Technology Jobs. When the people who make these calls move on, their domain knowledge walks out with them. Add the fact that over 50% of manufacturers cite skills shortages as the main barrier to AI adoption, and only 2% say AI is widely embedded across their operations, according to a Make UK report covered by The Manufacturer, and it is clear these decisions will sit with humans for a long time yet.
Start by separating the two problems. One is the engineering decision itself. The other is finding the people who can make it. If you fix the second, you protect the first.
Hiring the right technical people quickly is the lever that protects your engineers for the work only they can do. 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. No monthly fee, no upfront cost, and it is always free for the people looking for work. If make-or-buy calls keep stacking up on your engineers' desks, let us take the hiring off their plate: tell us the role and we'll start building your shortlist.
