East of England
Sector profile
- The East of England accounts for 9% of all engineering employment and 11% of all engineering establishments in Great Britain.
- The engineering sector in the East of England employs 116,500 people in 7,890 establishments.
- The largest sectors in terms of employment are mechanical equipment, electronics and metal products.
- There are above average concentrations of employment in the electronics and mechanical equipment sectors when compared to Great Britain.
- 95% of engineering establishments in the East of England employ less than 50 people.
- Engineering employment is geographically concentrated around Basildon, Peterborough, Luton, South Cambridgeshire, Stevenage and Huntingdonshire.
Workforce demographics
- 93% of the engineering workforce in the East of England is employed on a full-time basis.
- 79% of the engineering workforce in the East of England is male.
- About 5% of the engineering workforce in the East of England is non-white.
Recruitment issues and skills shortages
- Over 10,000 people were recruited into the engineering sector in the East of England during March 2006/07.
- 17% of engineering establishments in the East of England had hard-to-fill vacancies over that period.
- The main reasons cited for hard-to-fill vacancies were a lack of applicants with required qualifications and skills and a lack of applicants with required work experience.
- 21% of engineering establishments in the East of England reported skill gaps in the current workforce, mirroring the proportion within the UK (21%). The incidence of reported skill gaps ranges from 33% of other transport equipment establishments to 16% of metals establishments.
- 18% of all engineering establishments within the East of England employed apprentices or recognised trainees (22% for UK engineering). However, this varies considerably by size of establishment, ranging from 42% of those employing 250 or more people to only 5% of those employing less than 10 people.
The sciences
The East of England has a thriving bioscience industry, Cambridge being home to:
- Over 185 biotech companies
- Around 20% of the world's Nobel Prize winners in medicine and chemistry
- 17 of the UK’s publicly quoted biotech companies
- A quarter of the public biotechnology companies in Europe
The following sectors are important to the region:
- Drug discovery and development -organisations are active in all stages of the drug discovery and development for areas such as cancer, neurological, cardio-vascular, infectious diseases, diabetes, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases etc).
- Bio-instrumentation and equipment
- Research into novel drug delivery systems
- Food and agricultural biotechnology -
- Animal Healthcare - The main animal healthcare capability in the region is the Animal Health Trust (AHT) at Newmarket, a world leader in the treatment of diseases in animals in addition to undertaking pioneering research into the prevention and detection of diseases in animals.
Source: Semta LMI report March 2010 and East of England Engineering Skills Balance Sheet Executive Summary 2008