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MANUFACTURING


Every year Make UK does National Manufacturing Day where we encourage our members to open the doors of their businesses for schools and colleges to come in and have a look at what goes on there. It’s a difficult ask because there’s all sorts of health and safety issues and things like that, but we do get a really good uptake on it and that’s always in September, so we’ve got that coming up and it’s a big thing in our calendar.


It’s all about peer to peer collaboration. It’s the companies that are looking out from their businesses that are going to be successful, not the ones who have their heads down in the business.


Paula Gill North West Aerospace Alliance


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At this moment in time in Lancashire we have such a condensed area of manufacturers, not just across aerospace and defence but across automotive, manufacturing for nuclear components. What we have a need for now is change, and that change comes with people and skills.


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We have backlogs of orders, we have changing technology, and changing product. We have businesses that need to invest to be able to keep up with the changes first of all. Then we’ve got to ramp up the rate. If we have an existing supply chain that needs to do more, how are they going to do more if they haven’t got the people, they haven’t got the facilities, they haven’t got the equipment, they haven’t been able to secure the materials. So we have to address a much wider ecosystem that ultimately feeds into our overall economy.


A lot of our SMEs cannot afford to just sit within one sector, they actually have a huge skill base in small businesses to be able to de-risk, grow their operation and work across multiple sectors. So when we talk about aerospace and defence, the chances are that business is going to be working in automotive, or they might have contracts in nuclear, or even food and drink. So we have to be mindful we can’t just ask businesses to change for one sector, we have to change the whole thing.


Darren Grantham Make UK


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It is like a perfect storm at the minute. It is not easy to be a manufacturer in the UK. You are facing the highest energy


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costs in Europe and skills shortages. It is not seen as an attractive business to be entering into as your career, which is slightly ridiculous because you go inside any engineering company or manufacturing company and there are really exciting things going on.


And people don’t see the other opportunities, the accountant, the marketing person, and the others required to run a business. We are seeing an ageing workforce as well. Where are the new skills coming from? Who’s going to replace these people who are at retirement age, and it’s not a place that looks attractive to young people when you see that kind of ageing workforce.


Melissa Conlon Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre North West


I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. If you look


at Lancashire compared to the rest of the country, I think we are doing very well. If you look at manufacturing in Lancashire, it’s not going to be a case of what we made previously, it’s a case of what do we want to make in the future. We have those choices because of the sectors we are in with aerospace. We have clean tech, energy, nuclear, and I think they’re going to be coming and knocking on our doors. I think all the skills challenges, we can actually solve them.


We cannot underestimate the breadth of our supply chain. That’s probably Lancashire’s superpower really, in terms of the breadth of it. And what we are not doing enough of is mapping capabilities and our clusters, so when we actually go and speak to government we don’t have enough information to drive that inward investment.


If you look at our careers, historically they have been linear. I look at CVs sometimes and if somebody has moved around a lot, 10 years ago that would go to the bottom of my pile and I would not take that person on. I look at it now and I think, okay, so what have you gained from that role as opposed to what you did in that role, what was different about that, and when I’m interviewing them I really dig deeply into what skills they’ve learned.


Karen Keighley Tapeswitch


I went into Tapeswitch as a salesperson and I trained in marketing at Blackburn and also at Lancaster


University. I did a lot of personal development and I am now the MD of the company, so it stands to reason that it’s a great way to actually achieve something. I do not consider myself a manufacturer, but you can’t have a manufacturing company without somebody that knows about accounts and finance and people and everything else. I don’t know how to make anything, but I know how to run the company.


I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. If you


look at Lancashire compared to the rest of the country, I think we are doing very well


Claire Shore Blackburn College


We focus on the technical skills that those who come to study with us at whatever age and phase of their career need, and that’s fundamentally important. Of equal importance is the digital maturity that people leave our organisation with and the organisational understanding, not of our institution, but of how organisations work.


It is about preparing all of our learners, but particularly the young people who are coming from school, for their careers and towards work readiness.


It is no longer just about telling them the jobs they are going to be doing in the future won’t be the same as the jobs that exist today. I would lean to a really old phrase, which is, ‘if you can see it, you can be it’. From a skills perspective, we can teach the things our business community wants, but the real value comes when our students go into a business and see what they are doing.


At Blackburn College we have actively used the 10 work ready skills that were produced out of the Lancashire Skills and Employment Hub. The fact that multiple organisations and institutions around Lancashire are using those same words, the same language, helps get that conversation going.


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