Industry acts to get more engineering graduates

The electronics industry has moved to tackle the threat of lowering skills standards in the UK.

The UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) is a group of public bodies and companies which is aiming to create initiatives to increase the number of industry-ready graduate engineers and boost career take-up in the sector.

“The dramatic decline in the numbers of Electronic Engineering graduates will present the country with a long term issue if left unchecked,” said Derek Boyd, CEO of the National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) which is behind the initiative.

Also behind the move are BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills), SEMTA (The Sector Skills Council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies), ARM, CSR, Dialog Semiconductor and Imagination Technologies.

According to Indro Mukerjee, chairman and CEO of C-MAC MicroTechnology and chair of SEMTA’s Electronics Sector Strategy Group: “It has taken a lot of hard work and collaboration to get UKESF off the ground and I now look forward to it becoming an integral part of the UK electronics scene.”

Founder university partners are Bristol, Edinburgh, Imperial College, Southampton and Surrey.

“We’ve identified the underlying problems in the existing skills pipeline which undermine the future prospects of the industry and UKESF has been created to tackle the major issues,” said Boyd.

“The foundation has set itself realistic goals yet to achieve them more private enterprises need to support it. Forward looking electronics companies need to sign-up to the UKESF programme and help address what is a national concern of strategic importance,” said Mukerjee.

See: Q5 Interview - Indro Mukerjee, C-MAC MicroTechnology

Richard Wilson
Wednesday 27th January 2010