Engineering and manufacturing are vital to the UK economy, but growing skills shortages and skills gaps are creating increasing challenges for businesses across the sector, particularly SMEs.

Commissioned by Enginuity and delivered by SQW in collaboration with Oxford Innovation Advice and Qa Research, Mind the Gap explores the scale and impact of these challenges, combining employer insight, survey evidence and economic modelling to better understand their implications for productivity, growth and the future workforce.

In this webinar, SQW and Enginuity presented new research quantifying the scale and cost of skills gaps across UK engineering and manufacturing, before exploring the implications for employers, policymakers and the wider sector.

Bringing together industry, policy and research perspectives, the discussion featured Ian Ritchey OBE, Deputy Chair at Enginuity; Ann Watson MBE, CEO of Enginuity; Sergei Plekhanov, Director at SQW; Paul Dickens, Managing Director at Oxford Innovation Advice; and Katy Davies, Managing Director at Cap Air Systems.

The Policy Centre for Supply Chain and SMEs, powered by Enginuity, unifies and amplifies the voice of the UK’s engineering and manufacturing SMEs and the supply chain.