Bridging the Gap
Summary
Socio-economic diversity in the engineering sector: access, pay and progression.
Engineering has a relatively strong reputation for social inclusion, compared with other broadly comparable ‘highly skilled’ professions. However, there remain some questions about the extent to which this inclusive reputation can be supported by evidence, and there are evidently areas where more could be done to address unequal access, progression and pay.
Learning more about socio-economic diversity and inclusion in the sector has two major benefits: first to improve our understanding of why engineering performs relatively well compared to other sectors, which could help efforts to improve inclusion elsewhere and shed light on why barriers to entry and progression persist; and second to help the engineering sector itself to further improve.
Engineering matters. It has a key role in driving economic growth and productivity, generating almost a quarter (21.4%) of the UK’s turnover. Engineering constitutes a large proportion of the UK workforce: those working in relevant roles accounted for 19% of all UK employees in 2018. Socio-economic diversity and inclusion in the sector are also vitally important. In their 2015 analysis of efforts by the professions to improve social mobility, the Social Mobility Commission found that engineering and construction were the least active of large recruiters in this area. The analysis was based on the number of recruiters reporting targeted strategies to address socio-economic differences, and the number monitoring the social background of staff.
The evidence indicates that demand outstrips supply in the sector. One recent study estimates an annual shortfall of 22,000 new engineers, while another suggests a shortfall between 37,000 and 59,000 in meeting the annual demand for core engineers with Level 3+ skills. These shortages are partly attributed by Engineering UK to a lack of awareness of the educational routes into
engineering occupations.
One strategy to meet this demand is to encourage a wider pool of new entrants from all socio-economic groups. Such a pool might be better suited to developing creative solutions for the whole population, if the engineers developing those solutions are representative of a diverse cross-section of society. Enhancing socio-economic diversity in engineering would also support the national economy, since filling these skills shortages could help to address a significant societal challenge with upward social mobility in the UK.
This report synthesises and analyses what is known about socio-economic diversity and inclusion in the engineering sector, and begins the necessary process of collating new primary data to exploring these matters in greater detail.