Last week we held our manufacturing event at NUAST in Nottingham, with the aim of celebrating Nottingham and Nottinghamshire’s manufacturing excellence and what is still a hugely important sector to our local economy.
Run in conjunction with the Nottingham Manufacturing Network and the University of Nottingham, guest speakers included Councillor Graham Chapman (Nottingham City Council), Mark Goldby (SMS Electronics and NMB’s Manufacturing Interest Group Chair), Martin Johnson (Greene, Tweed) and David Ralph (D2N2 LEP).
With increasing labour costs abroad, quality considerations and supply side risk (speed and certainty of delivery) there is an increasing trend for UK businesses to bring manufacturing home. While this trend has started to gain momentum, since 2011 only 2,000 jobs have been created in the UK as a result or reshoring compared to the USA where 80,000 jobs have been created over the same period. Government support is now aligning behind manufacturing and 1 in 6 UK businesses are considering bringing production home.
Changing the perception of manufacturing in our schools continues to be a challenge and contributes to what we’ve come to term as the ‘skills gap’. NUAST is an extremely important initiative for Nottingham, which serves to promote careers in manufacturing in addition to providing an inspiring environment to breed innovation and employability skills. Working together as businesses to offer training opportunities is of paramount importance and collaboration to bring on talent should replace any thoughts of talent war between individual organisations.
The ‘Made in Britain’ badge still carries huge international weight and is something we should be very proud of on both a local and national level..
Speakers and organisers outside the very impressive NUAST building.
The panel are quizzed by the audience.
Inspired designs on display at NUAST.
A report on the event in the Nottingham Post.
A big thank you to everyone involved in putting on this event and to all those who attended.
To view the photos, please see visit – www.neilhoylephotography.com