It's tight, and the numbers make that plain. Skills shortages are the top barrier to growth for three in four manufacturers, with recruitment and talent retention close behind Barclays Corporate – Skills shortage in UK Manufacturing. The engineering picture is just as stretched: 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist skills topping the list Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
The gap carries a real cost. There were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing in 2025, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year Make UK – Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. When a motion control role sits empty, it isn't just one seat. It can slow a line, a project, or a whole automation programme.
Motion control sits right where manufacturing is changing fastest. Six in ten (59%) manufacturers cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as the trends reshaping jobs and skills needs, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to rise by 2030 Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. These are roles that blend servo tuning, PLC and drive knowledge, and problem solving under pressure.
That mix is exactly why so many teams feel they can't interview without a specialist in the room. The person who truly understands the work may be the one you're trying to replace, or they may be too busy on the line to sit on a panel. And demand keeps climbing: 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as automation and digitalisation take hold Make UK Executive Survey 2026. The people who could assess the role are the same people under most pressure.
Start by turning the job into competencies, not job titles. Break motion control into four or five clear areas you can define in plain language: servo and drive fundamentals, PLC and control logic, fault diagnosis, commissioning and safety, and how someone communicates a technical decision. Write one or two questions per area with a model answer, so anyone on the panel knows what good sounds like.
Then build a panel of adjacents. An automation engineer, a maintenance lead, or a controls technician from a nearby cell can each judge part of the picture even if none of them is a pure motion control expert. Give one of them ownership of the technical script and the model answers, so the depth lives in the questions rather than in any single person's head.
The practical task does a lot of the heavy lifting. Ask the person to talk through diagnosing a stalled axis or tuning a loop, and the depth of their experience shows fast, even to a non-specialist listener. Pair that with a short external review for your shortlist and you get expert judgement where it matters most, without needing a specialist on every interview.
Getting the right people in front of your panel is half the battle, and that's where we help. We search a database of 15 million candidates, rank a shortlist, and contact matched people quickly, so your panel spends its limited time on the strongest motion control profiles rather than sifting. You stay in control of the competencies and the scoring; we handle the finding and the admin 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. If you're building a panel without a specialist, let Reed.ai bring you the shortlist worth interviewing.
