Bernard Ginns: Sobering reality of trying to staff manufacturing firms

It will also be of interest to anyone with a stake in the wider economy as it sheds light on what is happening when businesses want to grow and create new jobs.

The story concerns a manufacturing business, one with a great product, a dedicated, hard-working workforce and a near round-the-clock operation.

The company is led by a passionate management team, equipped with a potent mix of energy, ideas and ambition.

The business has investors who have bought into the vision of the directors, who want to take their already successful products and sell them into new markets.

Part of that strategy involves creating a new division with significant investment in new plant and machinery and some new semi-skilled workers to operate them.

The company starts the search for the people to fill the new jobs.

Interview day arrives. The first interviewee is late and scruffily dressed. The second doesn’t turn up. The third avoids eye contact with the interviewer. The fourth doesn’t turn up. The mother of the fifth phones in to say he’s not feeling well. The sixth doesn’t turn up. The seventh is keen but has a criminal record and lacks suitable experience, but the company thinks him worth a chance, given the lack of suitable candidates.

The eighth has awful body language and emits a series of sighs and monosyllabic grunts in response to the interviewer’s questions.

The ninth is a man with an Eastern European accent. He tells the interviewee his story. He was working in a factory on the outskirts of a capital city in a new EU member state but his employer had suffered financial difficulties because of cheaper competition in the Far East and so closed its doors the Friday before.

Knowing that he wouldn’t find another job in his homeland, he packed his bags and got on a coach to the UK.

He saw the advert and won an interview, wowing the interviewer with his presentational skills, wide-ranging engineering experience and irrepressible desire to work.

Compare his attitude to the English applicants, those who bothered to turn up, and you can see a gulf between them.

The MD is exasperated. He is creating good quality jobs with salaries well above the minimum wage in an area of need and the response he gets is shocking.

“Skills, or the lack of them, in the UK workforce is the number one challenge facing my company,” he told me.

It’s a particular issue when trying to fill semi-skilled posts, he added.

“The Eastern Europeans have a real desire to work that you just don’t see from a lot of our young people.

“What happens if they decide to stop coming to the UK?”

It’s a real concern. This is a story that is replicated across the region, across the country. The initial response is, of course, that something must be done to fix the education system. But it’s not that easy anymore.

Hundreds of billions of pounds have been spent on education over the last two decades and yet the system is still failing to produce young people with the skills that industry needs.

Schools are weighed down by red tape and bureaucracy and are contending with spending cuts, while staff in many schools have to devote most of their energies to crowd control, rather than luxuries like teaching.

The reality here is that if business wants to improve the skills of its workforce it has to invest itself in training. The Government could help this by making it tax-efficient for business to do so.

Last week, we reported on the stellar efforts of Airedale International Air Conditioning to invest in its workforce.

In a damning assessment, Clive Parkman, managing director, said neither school-leavers nor engineering graduates are ready to fill vital roles without up to three years of further training.

The £40m-turnover business has spent £250,000 on a purpose-built training school. Mr Parkman said: “There is a dearth of highly-skilled people coming through.”

Company directors might like to follow his lead and invest in staff training. The Government should show some willing and lower tax bills accordingly.

ECONOMISTS tell me that recoveries are characterised by volatile data, so we should try not to read too much into reports which lurch one way or the other.

But it was difficult to ignore the revelation in the latest survey of purchasing managers at representative companies across the UK.

It showed that Yorkshire and Humber reported the weakest average growth of all regions in the second quarter of the year. That has to be worrying.