Electronics careers in the UK – Could we do better?

This article originally appeared in the October'24 magazine issue of Electronic Specifier Design – see ES's Magazine Archives for more featured publications.

The world is full of contradictions. Consider the fact that, while the UK is short of 350,000 engineers on one hand, on the other the media is awash with stories of hundreds of graduates applying for the same role, with many ending up working in shops or cafes. This worrying disconnect on the macro level is echoed in our own experience every time we try to recruit engineers with a background in electronic design.

Our business is a dynamic, high growth developer of specialist antenna that are used in mobile phones, laptops, vehicles, and even the latest generation of mobile satellites. Based in the UK, we benefit from various innovation grants from the government, but struggle to find the right calibre of candidate to grow our business on the scale we would really like to. Our most recent recruitment round highlighted the scale of the challenge facing the UK’s electronics industry. For every 100 applicants we see for qualified roles, the number who are UK educated can be counted on one hand.

That’s a sobering indictment of either our education system or the industry’s ability to promote itself as an attractive and viable career. I suspect the answer is a mixture of the two. Traditionally, degrees in electronic engineering have not been considered particularly sexy, but I suspect that may be changing. While UCAS, the clearing house, put the average wage for an electronic engineer at a very respectable £47,000, it is also encouraging to see that the latest cohort of A level students taking maths was up by 11%. Good for the long-term future of the sector perhaps, but what about the here and now?

While we pride ourselves on the international nature of our workforce in the UK – including engineers typically from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe – it must also be noted that this reliance on highly qualified engineers may place the UK at a competitive disadvantage, given the global mobility of these people. Granted, living and working the UK may suit them now, but who can say if and when the turn of global events may pull this diaspora back to their nations of birth?

While we owe much of our continued growth and success to highly talented engineers from overseas, our ability to nurture our own skills base is a potentially critical Achilles Heel. We as an industry need to do more to shout about the highly rewarding and well remunerating careers possible within niche sectors of the electronics industry.

I cut my teeth in the comms industry with companies such as Plessy, GPT, 3, and Orange, even spending time at Loughborough University as its Industrial professor for several years. One way to encourage more students into electronics might be to promote a handful of attractive end-user applications – such a military comms, mobile satellites, and smart cities – to entice more young minds into our dynamic sector.

In short, we need greater connectivity between education and the industry. We have a new government in place, which can encourage these vital links. However, it’s down to the industry itself to push for a clear industrial strategy based on ‘picking winners’ and aligning degrees to support this vision.