Enginuity Future Skills Hub: Demystifying future skills for engineering and manufacturing employers

What is the Enginuity Future Skills Hub?

Technological innovation and the demands of the net zero transition mean that engineering and manufacturing are changing fast. The UK is investing huge amounts in technology in an effort to stay at the forefront of these changes, but without investing in the skills needed to harness those technologies, the sector can’t hope to realise its full potential.

That’s why, in partnership with sustainability newsletter and podcaster The Green Edge, we’ve launched the Enginuity Future Skills Hub: a jargon-free space for employers to find easy, accessible information about industry trends and future skills all in one place.

We created the Enginuity Future Skills Hub to demystify the technologies changing the face of engineering and manufacturing, helping employers understand their present and future skills needs so they can invest wisely, and remain competitive.

Why does the engineering and manufacturing sector need a skills hub now?

“If we’ve got a successful engineering and manufacturing sector, we’ve got a successful United Kingdom,” Enginuity CEO Ann Watson tells The Green Edge’s Fraser Harper on the first episode of the new Enginuity Future Skills Hub Podcast.

However, the increasing pace of technological change poses both opportunities and obstacles to the sector’s success. “A large employer recently told me that not that long ago they were having to upskill their workforce every ten years,” Watson explains. “Now we’re looking at upskilling between every three years and every 18 months.”

It’s tough enough for large employers to keep up with that pace of change, but for SMEs it’s even more of a challenge. Adding to this, the UK has four different governments handling skills education, and there’s a constant influx of new technical jargon making it even harder for time-poor SMEs to keep up while running a business, managing limited resources, and maintaining cash flow.

“If we don’t have the small and medium-sized organisations, there’s no components for the big employers to actually pull together and create planes and cars and the rest of it,” says Ann Watson, explaining the critical importance of SMEs being able to meet changing skills demands.

That’s why the Enginuity Future Skills Hub, like many of our current efforts, is designed with SMEs in mind. Small businesses need a single, centralised hub of information that will help them upskill their workers and keep the UK’s engineering and manufacturing sector thriving.

What can employers find in the Enginuity Future Skills Hub?

The Enginuity Future Skills Hub will hold a wide range of resources on different technologies and how they’re driving skills demand, all presented in an accessible, bite-sized format.

The Hub will include regular articles on topics of interest in skills and technology, interviews with sector leaders, and new episodes of the Enginuity Future Skills Hub Podcast. For each technology covered, we explore the benefits and skills required to harness them, and include case studies to give small employers the chance to see how businesses like theirs have successfully navigated their own skills challenges.

The first topic the Enginuity Future Skills Hub tackles in depth is digitalisation – one of the most-discussed subjects in engineering and manufacturing right now. We help employers understand their digitalisation journey from piloting smart manufacturing initiatives to implementing advanced analytics and decision-making support, integrating cyber- physical systems, and becoming a part of Industry 4.0.

If any of these terms seem obscure, a visit to the Enginuity Future Skills Hub will make them clear. We’ll soon be adding new content on electrification, sustainability, hydrogen, and much more.

Final thoughts

Employers of all sizes can find information and insights to help them demystify new trends, technologies, and transitions by visiting the Enginuity Future Skills Hub, and you can listen to the Enginuity Future Skills Hub Podcast at The Green Edge.

As a sector-connecting charity whose mission is to close the UK’s skills gaps wherever we find them, Enginuity also invites employers in engineering and manufacturing to tell us what you want to know about. Whatever the subject, we are committed to putting it at your fingertips with the Enginuity Future Skills Hub.