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nyone looking for signs of sustained recovery in the UK economy can probably take comfort from recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and
Traders fi gures showing a continuing rise in domestic car sales. But the bigger picture is more mixed.Falling demand in Europe is continuing to inhibit sales. Meanwhile automotive companies continue to wrestle with a complex range of people-related challenges that affect their ability to compete.
Most businesses face a common set of people issues. Finding, recruiting and retaining the right staff. Staff motivation and reward. Matching capacity to demand in a volatile marketplace. Getting more from the workforce while very often reducing overall costs. These are recognisable challenges in just about every sector.
But these common challenges are inevitably overlaid by more specifi c problems related directly to circumstances of individual companies and industries.
In the automotive industry, the recruitment, retention and motivation of suitably skilled staff are perennial challenges – and they are not becoming any easier to address. There are various reasons for this but at a fundamental
level recruiters in the sector are grappling with a branding problem. Over the past fi fty years or so the stories coming out the UK industry have majored on declining capacity, uncertainty and factory closures. Today the industry has stabilised and is even thriving, but its recent history has made it progressively less attractive
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to engineers and other skilled individuals as they leave universities, colleges and schools. At the margins the phasing out of defi ned benefi t/ fi nal salary pension schemes for new recruits has arguably contributed to the automotive sector as a whole losing something of its allure to young skilled workers who may instead turn
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