SkillWeld shows young people what they’re missing

The Autumn Statement confirmed that the various infrastructure projects in the pipeline will go ahead as planned. But, as we all know, the engineering industry is dogged by a skills shortage that could stop those projects dead before they’ve even started.

Welding, for example, is a skilled trade that is used in almost all forms of engineering but it’s suffering from a severe lack of interest and uptake from young people.

Many opinion pieces blame the skills shortage on the perceived lack of excitement the industry has to offer. However, as a 2015 survey by the Telegraph found, the real problem could well be that young people simply don’t know what a career in a specific trade like welding would entail.

In most of the industry’s previous attempts to address the skills shortage, we have promoted careers under the overarching category of ‘engineering’ – an umbrella term made up of countless individual trades. It’s so broad that it’s hard to imagine what a career in engineering might actually involve and this may be why trades such as welding are not piquing the curiosity of young people as much as we would’ve hoped. But there are some initiatives that have been more successful than others, and the key lies in the detail.