A future in engineering or PR

London – The growing skills gap facing UK industrial companies has been one of the most talked about issues of recent years - and rightly so, as the need to inject the new lifeblood of young talent and enthusiasm becomes ever more pressing.

With the talking has come a seemingly unending stream of government skills and training initiatives, the latest of which is the Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize - a £1m award for “exceptional advances in engineering.”

Launching the scheme, prime minister David Cameron said: ’”For too long Britain’s economy has been over-reliant on consumer debt and financial services. We want to rebalance the economy so that Britain makes things again - high-skilled, high-value manufacturing and engineering should be a central part of our long-term future.”

The concern is, though, that this is just more government PR that helps it duck out of delivering the funding needed to support a workforce equipped to succeed in competitive global markets.

The fact remains that the situation in the UK is still a world away from that in competitor countries, such as Germany and Japan, where science and engineering is central to economic planning, and industry contributes much more to the cost of training apprentices, students and employees.