There is a very interesting contradiction at the heart of the UK labour market right now, and anyone reading the headlines could be forgiven for missing it entirely. Unemployment has risen to 4.9%, its highest level in years, with 1.76 million people out of work. Vacancies across the economy have fallen to their lowest level since 2021, down more than half from their 2022 peak. By most conventional readings, this looks like a straightforward story of a cooling jobs market. However, walk onto almost any UK automation, drives or controlgear factory floor and you will hear a very different story. Nearly 50,000 engineering jobs are still vacant. Three in four engineering employers say they cannot find the people they need. This is not because there are too few jobs. It is because people do not have the right skills for the jobs available. But perhaps the drives and controls sector could help to fix that. The two figures are not contradictory so much as they are describing entirely different labour markets. One is general and shrinking. The other is specialised, growing, and starved of worthy candidates. EngineeringUK estimates the profession needs well over 170,000 new engineers and technicians every year through to 2030 simply to stand still, at a time when close to a third of the existing manufacturing workforce is older than 50 and heading for retirement, and barely one in seven engineers is under 30. Make UK puts the cost of this gap to the sector at more than £7bn a year in lost productivity. This is not an abstract figure. It is downtime, missed contracts, and projects delayed because nobody was available to commission the drive, service the switchgear, or program the safety system. This is where the argument about unemployment and the argument about skills stop being two separate conversations’and become one. Reducing headline unemployment is not simply about creating more jobs. Plenty of vacancies already exist; they are simply the wrong shape for the people looking for work. The challenge is to build a pipeline that turns general jobseekers, school-leavers, and career-changers into people equipped for the specific, technical roles that automation and controls businesses have in abundance. This is a task manufacturers cannot solve alone, and it is exactly the kind of sector-wide structural problem that trade associations exist to address. This is also precisely the gap the Gambica Education Industry Council (GEIC) was designed to close. Bringing universities and further education establishments directly into Gambica’s membership, alongside our industrial members, helps to bridge fundamental gaps between the two. Academic members get direct insight into the problems industry is actually trying to solve – rather than designing courses around what a curriculum committee assumed the sector needed five years ago. Industrial members, in turn, get access to guest lecture slots, undergraduate placements, postgraduate research projects, and more – which is a far more reliable route into the workforce than hoping the right graduate applies cold. None of this replaces the schoollevel work of making engineering look like an attractive career, but it does something arguably more difficult, which is making sure that the people who do choose this path arrive job-ready, with the practical exposure that a purely academic route rarely provides. None of this is to suggest the answer is simple. Apprenticeship starts in the engineering and manufacturing sectors grew by less than 1% last year, against an annual requirement for roughly 168,000 new entrants. Persistent misconceptions about what a modern automation career actually looks like continue to put off school-leavers. But Gambica’s shared standards work, technical committees, and the credible voice we take to government, allow us to gain leverage over its our members’ future workforce by building on the networks and partnerships that we can help form. To discover what the Gambica EducationIndustry Council has achieved join the GEIC at the Collaborate! 2027 event, taking place in January next year in Northampton. Discover how we bring industry and academia closer together to facilitate two-way engagement. Visit our Web site to find out more. ‘Reducing headline unemployment is not simply about creating more jobs. Plenty of vacancies already exist; they are simply the wrong shape for the people looking for work.’ * Gambica is the trade association for the automation, control, instrumentation and laboratory technology sectors in the UK. You can get in touch with Nikesh Mistry on 020 7642 8094 or nikesh.mistry@gambica.org.uk, or via the Gambica Web site: www.gambica.org.uk 56 July/August 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com Tackling the jobs conundrum Although UK unemployment has hit its highest level in years, there are still nearly 50,000 unfilled jobs in the automation and engineering sector. How do you explain this disparity, and what can be done to tackle it? Nikesh Mistry*, Gambica’s sector head for automation, considers the issue.
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