Analysis: High tech skills get a base in Scotland Richard WilsonA thriving high tech industry relies on a solid foundation of a suitably skilled and motivated local community of engineers and managers.
Westminster politicians may have only just realised this, but in Scotland the government is working with local employers and universities in the UK’s most ambitious plan to put in place the skills to support the regions growing microelectronics, photonics and communications activities.
Scottish politicians have realised that if they are to achieve their goal of adding 5,000 high –skill electronics and communications jobs to the workforce in the next three years they need to attract to the country more skilled engineers from around the world.
Scottish Enterprise is putting £50m behind an action plan which it hopes will both re-skill the local workforce as well as create a high tech community which will attract the necessary foreign talent.
This is no electronics backwater. Companies have manufactured and to a lesser extent designed products in Scotland for as long as there has been a European electronics industry. The imperative now is to turn the balance away from production and more to more permanent design activities.
But this is not just about government schemes to re-skill staff laid off from manufacturing plants in the last 12 months.
“The aim is to attract the high quality, high flying engineers the companies need,” says Neil Francis, director of the Alba Centre, the original government-backed initiative which has for more than five years sat close to the centre of Scotland’s indigenous semiconductor IP design community.
“The local activities of system level design, IP development and exchange and embedded design are all vital to the future of the industry,” says Francis. “But they require access to a skills resource.”
That resource for the microelectronics, optoelectronics and communications sectors is currently 30,000 staff working in around 200 companies, says Francis. “Local employers have told us that they will need to recruit 5,000 new staff over the next three years,” he adds.
According to Francis, this skills requirement is significant and unlikely to be affected by the downturn in the communications market. “Clearly Scotland has been hit hard but there have been far fewer layoffs in the design community,” he adds.
Francis is conscious that there is work to do promoting Scotland as a high tech hotbed in the main electronics markets of the US, Europe and the Far East. But he is confident that the groundwork has already been done with Scottish universities now producing around 2,500 engineering and technology graduates each year.
“There is a strong pipeline of graduates, but you still need the experienced engineers to drive companies forward. We need to attract world-class engineers to Scotland,” says Francis.