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Dave Jones
Paula Gill
David Lord
Richard Craddock Continued from Page 41
We established ‘FalconWorks’, a new business within the Air Sector, to encourage more open and collaborative working outside the organisation. This is delivering some good results but there is still more to do.
Pat G: We’ve done some software changes, so that our various machines now all speak the same language. There is rising staff confidence as they have an active involvement. One of the biggest challenges we face is money. We’re an SME, we’re self-financing.
If we had a long-term view of the investment that we might need to make, we could make that with some certainty. If we get a contract and it’s long-term, we can negotiate part investment with a client but, without that, where do we find these funds?
WG: We are an SME from the smaller end of the SME spectrum, we punch above our weight from the back streets of Nelson. We’ve invested in tech; we’ve looked at newer machinery. It’s a case of knowing when to make the investments against the challenges that you have. It’s not just the cost of the machines, it’s the cost of moving them, the cost of downtime.
DJ: We had a project for two years, pretty much to take out drone technology out to SMEs around Lancashire, trying to get them to diversify and get involved within the sector that was producing them. I’ve been involved with drones for about 15 years now, and we are still talking to companies now that have no idea what drone technology can actually do for them.
What challenges do you have with recruitment, retention and skills?
RC: We’re stuck in a little corner of the UK, and the youngsters in the area are generally looking to go away. We find that there is a desire to do a lot more remote working. There are aspects of the working world that can function perfectly fine remotely, but engineering isn’t one of them. The difficulty now is that youngsters are coming from college and universities wanting to go straight in and on to the new technology, but the technology will only be new for a very short period of time. There’ll be something else.
Mick Hull
WG: The tech is helpful because there is still that idea of ‘grim engineering’ that a lot of apprentices have, thinking ‘Well, I don’t want to do that, it’s oil and stuff.’
You’re telling them there is all this amazing kit but the problem is that at the same time you don’t want to upskill to the point where you completely remove the skill base from your core. So, it still needs to be, ‘Yes, okay, there’s all this amazing stuff, please come do this, but remember we’ve also got to do that’. It’s marrying the two.
DL: We’ve invested heavily in technology and equipment. We need to work closely with companies, otherwise we will keep churning out the same stuff. We integrate our learners in all these technologies. Robotics and automation are part of the course, we have fluid dynamic systems and they go in every section.
Paula G: We’ve developed The Northern Skills Council. I set it up about 18 months ago. We’ve got industry that needs to learn
Graeme Bond
better offering. We need to really bring those boundaries down.
The government has just made taking on apprentices more difficult again, they are actually strangling enterprise instead of nurturing it. We’ve got some cracking companies in this area and they are strangled into taking less apprentices than they would like and need to futureproof their business.
DJ: We now have a fourth year MSc in aerospace and engineering here at Altitude. The first applicant was from FalconWorks. Anybody who wants to end up at BAE, the one place they’re going to want to come to is the University of Lancashire, because they know that in that fourth year, BAE will be able to cherry pick the best of the best, and that’s how we’re trying to bridge that gap.
MH: Major programmes like the Future Combat Air System and Global Combat Air Programme are massive and they’re going to need a lot of people. I guess we’re all fishing in the same
We need to collaborate as SMEs to discover what our strengths are so that we can have a better offering
from academia because of the development of technologies that can only come from our colleges and universities. But we’ve also got what industry’s requirements are against what curriculums deliver.
There’s still a gap and The Northern Skills Council looks to bridge that gap. At the moment we’re finding out from industry leaders what their challenges and issues are around skills and right now it is about recruitment.
The next phase is to the sit down with the universities and the colleges and say, ‘What have you got and what are your challenges?’
Pat G: There’s a massive gap between academia and industry and it’s a very old, traditional gap. It has to come closer and we also need to bring skills education into that. We need to collaborate as SMEs to discover what our strengths are so that we can have a
pond to some extent, but we can do that more intelligently if we talk about it.
The close collaboration we have with the University of Lancashire is a great start, but we need to do more. We have close on 1,400 apprentices and graduates across the Air Sector, but that’s still not enough to meet the demand of those big programmes. It’s getting out there, talking about what we do and showing the range of opportunities that exist.
Paula G: Academia is doing a lot to get into businesses when, actually, it’s the businesses that aren’t going into the universities and the colleges.
GB: Attracting talent is always difficult in engineering, it needs to be promoted as a cool job to go for. Engineering needs to be rebadged as Advanced Engineering.
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