Demand is strong, but the people are hard to find. 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 sits on top of growing ambition: demand for key occupations will grow by nearly 25% in the next decade, with 1.8 million new priority jobs expected by 2035 GOV.UK - Landmark report sets out action to address key skills gaps (Skills England).
Employers feel the squeeze directly. Manufacturers name skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) as their top barriers to growth Barclays Corporate – Skills shortage in UK Manufacturing. For plant work tied to subsea cabling and grid upgrades, that pressure lands hardest on technical and engineering roles, where 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).
The energy transition is reshaping what plants need. 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 digital, engineering and construction occupations appear most commonly among priority occupations, many already experiencing high recruitment demand and expected to keep growing strongly GOV.UK - Skills England annual skills report 2026. Subsea cable manufacturing and grid infrastructure pull on exactly these skill sets.
The nature of the work is changing too. Six in ten (59%) manufacturers cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030 Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. In response, 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation Make UK Executive Survey 2026.
There is a retention risk running underneath all this. Some 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026 Engineering and Technology Jobs (IET) / Rise Technical. And the pipeline is thin at the bottom: in engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK.
Start by widening the pool. With 76% of engineering employers struggling to recruit for key roles Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), waiting for the perfect ready-made hire slows everything down. Define the two or three skills that truly matter for the role, then look for people who can learn the rest. That matters more as cognitive and meta-cognitive skills become the priority: 74% of manufacturers expect demand for them to increase by 2030 Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap.
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