Nexos bosses discussed how they have seen “less people applying” for apprenticeships in recent years at a Scottish Apprenticeships Week event.
The Aberdeen-based engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm, formerly known as Global E&C, welcomed local skills and training organisations as well as a local MSP to its harbour-side facility in the Granite City to mark the weeklong celebration of trainees.
Graeme Gray, fabrication director for Nexos, said: “Going back 10 years, if you advertised an apprentice position you would be in the hundreds of applicants, I think when these recent guys came on the programme there were no more than 50 to 60 applicants.”
He added that his current batch of apprentices “are great” and that “there’s no talking away from the quality” of their work; however, “there are just less people applying”.
This supports recent reports from the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), which found that 71% of employers in the engineering construction industry have recruitment challenges of late.
On the oil and gas sector specifically, the trade body said that it is “unlikely” that oil and gas will be able to replace its aging workforce with younger employees, according to current trends.
Nexos employs between 10 and 12 apprentices each year and the firm’s managing director for offshore, Derek Mitchell, described them as “the people who will be driving our future”.
‘Immense’ job market pressures
However, oil and gas is not the only sector experiencing these challenges, as MSP for Aberdeen Central Kevin Stewart MSP pointed out while visiting the Nexos facility.
Stewart commented: “The pressure in the job market is so immense.”
He said that the industry’s engagement with young people is left “too late” and that employers need to be speaking to younger children about opportunities out with university.
“I think we should be going into primary schools and try to attract folk at that point in time because some kids do make up their minds early around about what they’re going to do,” he explained.
“You can see, even here in the north-east, whereby there was not a lot of companies going out of schools and most of them were oil and gas. Now, you’ve got companies galore trying to seek folk at an early stage because the competition is so high.”
The Holyrood politician argued that in “almost every sector there are labour shortages”.
This came about as the Aberdeen MSP met with Nexos apprentices and discussed their opinions on the programmes they are on and how school set them up for manual labour.
Aberdeen would ‘struggle’ with large-scale work
© Supplied by NexosMitchell corroborated the points made by his colleague and local politician. He added that “Aberdeen is nowhere near as busy as it was 10 years ago” as he argued that if a “major project” came to the city, it would “struggle”.
“We’ve got a centre that we use in Jakarta for engineering and the reason we’ve got that isn’t to do with saving money, it’s purely capacity driven because the capacity in Aberdeen is no longer there,” the Nexos boss and former industry apprentice added.
He claimed that the north-east of Scotland has “got a big challenge on retaining the people we’ve got”.
Mitchell recalled trips to Britain’s other energy capitals such as Humberside and how the flight home was “full of people coming to Aberdeen to work,” however, now “it’s people leaving Aberdeen to go and work these areas”.
To take advantage of the “opportunities that are out there, we need to look at our own industrial strategy,” Stewart said.
© Supplied by NexosHe discussed how manufacturing activities, especially within the wind and hydrogen sectors, are undertaken overseas.
The Aberdeen MSP said that the country needs to “make the changes that are required so that we are producing a number of things that we require, rather than importing electrolysers or importing whatever that may be. So that’s something that we need to look at much more closely.”
He pointed the finger at the UK government for not delivering the full £28 billion “difficulty” causing some of these issues as “most of that has been caught back”.
Before winning the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party pledged to spend £28 billion a year on the UK’s green transition, however, the now prime minister latter rolled back the figure.
Since coming to power, Starmer’s premiership has allocated additional funds to the country’s flagship renewables funding round and added incentives for developers to invest in local suppliers.
“A huge amount of investment money is required in order to change the industrial make up not only of Scotland but the whole of the UK to grab all of these opportunities,” Stewart commented.
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