The engineering skills body is overhauling its image and operations as the sector it serves readies for 'Industry 4.0'
Britain's workforce is changing. A job for life is a thing of the past, and in almost every industry - from fishing to fabrication - digital technology and the drive to decarbonise is leading to major disruption.
Employers must stay ahead of that ever-changing curve to succeed, recruiting newcomers with the right skills and retraining their existing workers to future-proof the firm.
Nowhere is this more important than the engineering and manufacturing sectors, two areas at the cutting edge of the UK's shift towards net zero.
"The world has started to speed up," says Ann Watson, chief executive of Enginuity, the skills body for the engineering and manufacturing sectors known until yesterday as SEMTA. "From a skills perspective, we need to move faster as well."
Watson recounts how employers used to have to reskill their workforces every decade. Now it's nearing every three years, and heading towards the 18-month mark common across the more advanced parts of the technology sector.
That's in part because those skills that once got a young graduate snapped up by the Googles and Amazons of the world - data scientists, programmers, innovation specialists - are now needed in almost every industry, from automotive to energy. Only last month National Grid released new research suggesting the energy sector will need to recruit at least 400,000 people in the UK over the next 30 years to deliver a net zero energy system, with tech-led skills such as cyber security and data scientists at the top of the demand list.
"But because we're moving into that digital world of autonomous vehicles, of digital railways, of autonomous airplanes, and the world of complex engineering systems and more complex problems to solve, what we're actually finding is all of those sectors are now needing the same type of skills," says Watson.
Aligned to the shift to digital in almost every industry is the inevitable disruption as each industry remodels itself for a net zero world. It means a re-wiring of factories, of employee skills, of marketing and corporate strategy.
As an organisation that works closely with employers to design qualification standards and apprenticeship schemes, Enginuity needs its finger on the pulse of how this world is changing. But until very recently, it was trying to predict the changes coming over the horizon using the tools of the past.
"In the old world of SEMTA it was very much about working with employers to identify predominately what engineering and apprenticeship standards they needed, and working with them to develop those apprenticeship standards," Watson concedes as she describes the body's work to BusinessGreen. "It was very much on an almost a manual, human-led basis."
That worked when Enginuity employed engineers, to help engineers recruit more engineers. But as the engineering and manufacturing sectors pivot towards a digital future, Enginuity had to change to keep up. The skills body is undergoing the same transformation as the firms it works with, embarking on a hiring spree of data scientists and innovation officers to help it harness the power of technology to better predict the future.
"Rather than our skills insight being predominantly gathered from conversations with employers, it's about how we use data science techniques to start crawling the web, to start picking up how job descriptions and how job roles in engineering are changing for instance, and identifying new words and phrases that we might not have seen before as a potential predictor of a new skill coming over the horizon," Watson explains. "For us it was really important that if we were to be able to speak confidently and be relevant with employers, we did have to be working in the same environment as them."
Watson believes Enginuity is one of the rare small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) getting to grips with the way the world is changing as a result of climate change and the data revolution. For most other smaller organisations, its "only just starting to come on to their radar", she says.
It's not helped by the education system, which is not reacting fast enough to the changing world of work, she argues. "Although we have a good education system, it's not a very agile education system," she says. "So even if we take something like apprenticeship standards, they only generally get reviewed every four years. And given the rate of change, that's quite a long time for the education system to be able to change and adapt."
The trouble is, the education system as it stands "builds things based on what jobs exist now", rather than looking at what jobs we might need in the future, she says.
For its part, Enginuity is doing its best to get the word out about how the engineering and manufacturing sectors are changing. As well as using its new-found digital prowess to help employers better predict what's coming down the pipe, its designing new tools to lure digital natives into the sector.
Watson describes the development of a new Minecraft-style game that is set in an electric car factory, in the hope it will encourage kids to consider engineering and manufacturing in a new light. Set for a launch through schools and colleges across the UK, the game will also be available worldwide online.
Enginuity has spotted earlier than many of its peers which way industries are heading, and looks set to play a key role in helping them transition. It's a story that is repeating across almost every sector of the UK economy as the net zero transition gathers pace. But whether the UK will have enough data scientists, algorithm writers, innovation officers, and sustainability experts to go around, remains the economy-shaping question.
