What to do about the laboratory skills gap

With an ageing technical workforce and a growing skills gap, the science, technology and engineering industries are facing a tough future. What can we do now to keep the UK at the forefront of technological innovation? Terry Croft from the University of Sheffield explains If a worker is only as good as their tools, then a scientist is only as good as their technicians. Innovative new ideas only go as far as theories without the technology to put them to the test, and results can’t be analysed unless you’ve got someone on your team with the technical skills to run the machines and generate the data. Technicians need to ask themselves, “Of all the world-class research that’s been carried out in my lab, how much of it did I help to make happen?” The answer might just remind you why you keep coming into work. The people in the labs – from the principal investigator to the trainee technician – already know this, of course. They know how important the part of the technician is, and how exciting each new day of discovery can be. It’s the people out there we need to convince: 450,000 of them need training up by 2020 if we’re going to have enough technicians to meet the demands of the science, technology and engineering industries that the UK economy relies on. There’s a skills gap that’s growing and there aren’t enough of us left to fill it. So how have we ended up in this situation? The truth is that for years, there have been factors playing out that have deterred and prevented new blood from joining technical professions. At some point, being a technician stopped looking like the viable long-term career that it always was (and which, despite it all, it actually continues to be). The steady decline of British manufacturing in the latter part of the last century didn’t help. Companies and institutions which managed to stay open still had to streamline their workforces to keep up with overseas competitors, who could produce perfectly good products with fewer technical staff. Add on to the end of this the recession from which we’re only just emerging, and employers suddenly find themselves stretched even thinner.

Behind every great discovery is a great scientist, and behind every great scientist is a great technician.

The issue for the technical community, when times are tight, is that the apprenticeships and traineeships that are designed to get young technicians started in their new careers, are amongst the first things to go. This frees up employers to keep on the more experienced staff they rely on to keep themselves ticking over, but the consequences this has for the future are obvious. In the UK higher education sector alone, we’re on the brink of losing 25-35% of our most skilled technicians to retirement over the next few years – who is going to replace them? There’s also an image problem that technicians need to address. As science professionals, we know that technicians are essential to ground-breaking research, experts at running the latest multi-million pound equipment to conduct vital experiments. But we can also be quite shy about it: it’s not a side that school, college and university students see, and these are the people we need to plug the skills gap. Our job now is to show the next generation of scientists and engineers that technicians do more than manage stocks and tidy up labs: we need to help them join us in making the key scientific discoveries of the future. And here’s how we’ll do it. For a start, at the University of Sheffield we’ve created places for apprentice technicians in the Faculty of Science, and trainee technicians in the Faculty of Engineering. These young men and women work in a variety of different departments, developing a range of key technical skills to prepare them for any number of potential careers in higher education and industry. But there are those wider structural problems to address too. That’s why a £400,000 project is being led by the University of Sheffield, with funding from Higher Education Funding Council for England, to lay the foundations of a technical workforce fit for the future. At its heart, this project is about building the infrastructure to support a sustainable community of experienced, professional technicians. It will start by creating a set of generic job types that higher education institutions can use to classify their technical staff. Then we’ll start setting out the career pathways that technicians can follow from whichever category they fall into. This means that for the first time, there will be a nationwide structure to show technicians which rung of the career ladder they’re on, what they need to do to climb on to the next one, and what sort of senior role will be waiting for them at the top. Underpinning this will be new, consistent training and assessment for new technicians, so that they don’t just get the basic skills they need to do their current job – they’ll learn as part of a national programme, so they’ll have the broad skills base and flexibility to move between employers across science, technology and engineering. Meanwhile, at the senior level, institutions will get better access to advanced training, so that as their most experienced staff retire, they’ll face less of a struggle to train up someone to replace them. This will ease the strain on employers, while creating opportunities for technicians to learn new skills and progress their own careers even further. All of which goes hand-in-hand with the professional accreditation scheme for technicians, offered by the Institute of Science and Technology (IST), under licence from the Science Council. Becoming a Registered Science Technician, Registered Scientist or Chartered Scientist gives technicians an official status which is recognised throughout science, technology and engineering. It is a signifier of the professional experience they’ve gained, and by meeting the requirements at each level of the scheme, technicians around the world are demonstrating to employers that they have the skills do the job. And that, really, is the key point. Technicians should be proud of what they are achieving every day – if they can show the world around them that they’ve done the formal training, got the official accreditation and built on their experience, then new opportunities will present themselves, and they’ll begin to inspire the next generation of technical staff. Because behind every great discovery is a great scientist, and behind every great scientist is a great technician. It’s time for us to step forward. Author Terry Croft MBE is Faculty Director of Operations for Science and Director of Technical Development and Modernisation at the University of Sheffield. Terry is also chairman of the Institute of Science and Technology.