The Engineer's 2020 business confidence survey

If the UK economy’s anxiety levels were already high at the beginning of 2020, then the events of the last 12 months have surely driven them into the stratosphere.

The emergence of a number of apparently effective vaccines has provided a realistic hope that we will at some point in 2021 start talking about the pandemic in the past tense; but the lingering consequences of its staggering economic impact will - as the Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned in his December spending review - be with us all for many years to come.

Faced with this stark economic backdrop, not to mention continuing uncertainty (at the time of writing) over the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU, key sectors of the UK economy can rarely have contemplated such a challenging and uncertain future. And this is particularly true of  its  engineering and manufacturing sectors.

This November, in order to find out how industry’s top engineers are feeling about the challenges they face, The Engineer conducted its first annual business confidence survey. We asked our readers - drawn from the highest levels of the sector -  to tell us how they are feeling about the year ahead, what technology areas and sectors they expect to dominate, and how they expect their own organisations to perform. The key findings are highlighted here.