Recommendation 82

The Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions said workforce recruitment, skills and retention were “the biggest challenge for the industry and the enterprise collectively.”129 City of Glasgow College, one of the biggest trainers of Scottish shipbuilders, agreed that “Scottish shipbuilding cannot succeed without addressing chronic shortages in labour and skills.”130 Witnesses identified several challenges facing the shipbuilding sector in relation to skills. One example was demographic change, and the difficulties that the sector faces in replacing a large generation of employees due to retire in the next five to ten years.131 Shipbuilders and trade unions told us that the challenge did not lie so much in recruiting younger people and apprentices, but in recruiting and retaining more experienced personnel. Sir Simon Lister of BAE and John Howie of Babcock both identified the recruitment of steelworkers as a particular challenge, noting that these skills were increasingly in demand across many sectors of the economy.132 Sir Simon suggested one reason it might be difficult to recruit experienced staff may be that “the absence of a national shipbuilding strategy in the last 15 years has led to a quiet atrophy of the intake and the training of the next generation,” but added that “in the last five years, progress has begun to accelerate again.”133