Why the UK Engineering Skills Shortage Is Partly a Marketing Problem

01 — The vacancy math

Three in four UK engineering employers say they cannot get the people they need. The Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 Skills Survey, based on 1,316 managers across engineering and technology firms surveyed with YouGov between February and March 2025, put the figure at 76%, with technical and sustainability-related skills the hardest to find. That is not a niche complaint from a handful of struggling firms. It is close to becoming the default state of hiring in the sector.

Manufacturing carries an even sharper version of the same problem. Make UK, the trade body for the sector, reported in a 2026 update that 36% of manufacturing vacancies are now hard to fill because applicants lack the right skills, qualifications or experience, against an average of 24% across all industries. Some of those roles sit open for over a year. Training pipelines, apprenticeships and immigration policy all get blamed for this, usually fairly. What gets discussed far less is how a company actually looks to the person deciding whether to apply in the first place.

02 — Effort in, nothing checked

Most engineering and manufacturing SMEs treat recruitment as an HR function or a job-board spend, not a marketing one. That gap shows up clearly in CIPD's Resourcing and Talent Planning research, carried out with Omni RMS between April 2023 and April 2024: 69% of employers said competition for staff had intensified over the previous year, and around four in five organisations said they were taking some action to improve their employer brand.

Only 14% of those organisations bothered to measure whether any of it worked. Effort is going in. Very little of it is being checked against results.

03 — What candidates actually find

A careers page that has not been touched since 2019, a LinkedIn company page that only ever posts client wins, and no visible answer to "what is it actually like to work here" will cost a firm candidates before a CV is ever opened. Candidate-research behaviour data from Glassdoor, drawn from its own platform usage rather than a UK-specific survey, shows the pattern clearly even if the exact numbers are American: job seekers who see a company's employer brand content repeatedly are far more likely to apply than those who see it once or not at all, and a rise in employer rating tracks directly with more applications started. The direction of that finding holds regardless of geography. People research employers the way they research suppliers, by looking for evidence rather than taking a claim at face value.

04 — The evidence is already there

For an engineering firm, that evidence is sitting in the business already and is rarely used. Photos of the actual shop floor. A plain description of what a first-year graduate engineer or apprentice does day to day. An honest account of what the firm gets wrong as well as right, since a page that reads as pure marketing invites more scepticism than one that reads as a workplace. None of this needs a large budget. It needs someone to treat the careers page and the company's LinkedIn presence as seriously as the sales website, because for a growing share of applicants, it is the only version of the company they will ever see before deciding whether to bother applying.

05 — The commercial case

The commercial case is straightforward once the vacancy numbers are put next to a project timeline. A hard-to-fill technical role that stays open for months is not an HR statistic, it is a delayed contract, a stretched team covering the gap, and in some cases a bid the firm cannot even put in because it does not have the people to deliver it. Treating employer branding as optional marketing spend rather than a recruitment tool ignores exactly what the IET and Make UK figures above are describing.

This is closer to Nebula's own view of the problem than a separate service line. Good employer-branding support for a technical SME means the same discipline applied to a sales website: clear, specific, honestly written content aimed at a defined audience, built from what the business actually does rather than generic claims, and checked periodically against whether it is bringing in better applicants, not just left to sit once it is published. Firms that already invest in getting their commercial story straight are usually in the best position to do the same for recruitment, because the underlying skill, telling the business's story accurately and well, is identical either way.