Several factors make attracting and retaining staff more difficult, including the rising cost of living and the need to offer attractive remuneration. Political changes have made it more difficult to recruit staff from abroad and the pandemic has encouraged people to adopt a new hybrid work lifestyle. The retirement of skilled staff has exacerbated the situation. Manufacturing companies have been affected by the issue as their highly experienced engineers and technicians with years of knowledge are leaving causing a major problem. Some 40% of manufacturers say 40% of their workforce is above 50 years old. With these skilled engineers retiring, manufacturers are not seeing the next generation of technically minded people stepping forward to replace them. Over two thirds of manufacturers say Maintenance Matters Focus on: Skills & Training 18 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk June/July 2023 Manufacturers looks to robotic automation to bridge the skills gap Today manufacturing companies are facing more challenges than ever before, from rising energy prices to parts supply issues and more recently an increasing skills shortage. The figures are telling and are indicative of conditions across the globe. PWE reports. applicants lack technical skills, with not enough young people choosing to study STEM subjects, leading to a 20,000 annual shortfall of engineering graduates. Suitable candidates are therefore in high demand, pushing up salaries even for relatively inexperienced staff. Ultimately these costs will need to be passed on the company’s customers, further increasing inflation. The other challenge is to make a career in manufacturing attractive. Many people see it as dirty, dull and potentially dangerous, requiring them to lift heavy loads or come into contact with processes that produce pollution or operate at extreme temperatures. Robotic automation is the way forward One of the major routes out of the skills impasse is greater adoption of robotic automation. Automating parts of the production line to reduce health & safety risks takes away the dangerous and dirty jobs and assigns them to robots, making factory work more attractive. Examples of applications where robots have been introduced across different industries show that workers invariably benefit through improved health and safety and working conditions. Robots taking over arduous tasks that require repetitive movements, heavy loads or those involving exposure to dust or debris enables employees to take on more rewarding tasks. Robots allow companies to upskill their employees, with workers being assigned to higher level tasks, including robot supervision and programming, or to handle more interesting tasks in other areas. They can also be offered the chance to take on new roles such as machine learning engineer, algorithm engineer and data scientist. This can encourage people to see manufacturing and engineering as a
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