The demand is real and it's growing. In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year, according to Make UK's Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. That's a lot of unfinished work, and it's a signal that plants adopting new materials like technical textiles are competing hard for people.
Skills shortages sit right at the top of the list of worries. Manufacturers name skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) as their leading barriers to growth, per Barclays Corporate's analysis of the skills shortage in UK manufacturing. When you add specialist materials into the mix, that pressure only sharpens.
The engineering side tells the same story. The Institution of Engineering and Technology found that 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list. Technical textiles sit squarely in that space: they're technical, and they're often tied to lighter, greener products.
Technical textiles pull together materials science, chemistry and process engineering, so the roles they create are more specialist than traditional line work. Think composite technicians, coating and lamination process engineers, quality specialists and materials scientists who understand how a fabric performs under heat, stress or wear. These are exactly the kinds of jobs that are hardest to fill today.
The shift is being driven by technology. Six in ten (59%) manufacturers cited automation and half (50%) cited wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030, according to Make UK's 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap report. In plain terms, plants need people who can think, problem-solve and work alongside smart machines.
There's also plenty of headroom to grow. The UK ranks just 24th in global robotics density, and targeted innovation and digital investment could add £150 billion to the UK's GDP by 2035, per Make UK's Making it Smarter report. Technical textiles are one of the specialisms that can help capture that opportunity, provided plants can find the right people to run them.
Start by being honest about what you can build versus what you must buy. Some 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, and this figure increases for firms with more than 1,000 employees, according to Make UK's Executive Survey 2026. Upskilling your current team for technical textile work is often faster than a cold external search, so map your internal talent first.
For the gaps you can't fill from within, write the role around the skill, not the job title. Specialist people rarely search for the exact words you use, so describe the material, the process and the outcome. Be clear on what's essential and what you'll train. And move quickly: when 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, as the IET reports, a slow process loses you the best people.
Finally, treat retention as part of hiring. With talent retention named a top-three barrier to growth in Barclays Corporate's skills shortage analysis, the effort you put into onboarding, progression and clear career paths protects the specialists you fight so hard to bring in.
We built Reed.ai to make specialist manufacturing hiring faster and simpler. We search a database of 15 million candidates to surface people with the exact skills your plant needs, then rank a shortlist and handle 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. Tell us the role you need to fill and we'll get started today.
