Scots firms turn to Poland in bid to find skilled workers

Scottish manufacturers are moving operations to Poland because they are stifled by a lack of skilled workers, according to a trade body.

Peter Hughes, chief executive of Scottish Engineering, told The Scotsman that some businesses were already considering re-locating manufacturing plants overseas to tap into the greater available skills base.

"A couple of our member companies are opening outlets in Poland to tackle it (the skills shortage]," he said.

"When Polish workers came here they were wonderful, they brought a lot of skills. Now we are taking some of them back to Poland along with Scottish managers so that we can make kit there using skilled people that didn't necessarily come to Scotland."

He added: "In every district meeting I have been to recently, skills shortages were flagged up. For the last four quarters or so we've been in active recruitment mode, and what we've noticed is that it's very hard to find the right people."

He said firms were spending more on internal training programmes, but there was an inevitable time lag to producing the skilled staff they needed for expansion, and the expense was an issue for many businesses. He said it costs at least 30,000 to train an engineer, of which companies can recoup between 6,000 and 7,000 from the government.

But even when businesses are prepared to offer such apprenticeships, they were finding it hard to recruit candidates with suitable numeracy and literacy skills.

"The alarming thing is that more and more member companies are telling me that the kids that come in can hardly even fill out a form," he said.

Hughes put that down to a combination of failures within the education system and a continued prejudice against the apprenticeship route into skilled employment.

He said a targets-based culture meant schools were only encouraging their lowest level students to apply for apprenticeships, as the success of a school was often judged by the number of pupils going on to university.Hughes' comments come in the same week as the Scottish Parliament's economy, energy and tourism committee highlighted a lack of clarity on who is delivering a skills strategy, three and a half years after the launch of Skills Development Scotland (SDS).

MSP Tavish Scott, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, criticised SDS and Scottish Enterprise for spending 4.5 million a year on PR and marketing.

He said: "Scottish Engineering's analysis makes our point that government complacency over their quangos is not delivering the skills that the Scottish economy needs."

A Scottish Government spokesman said SDS was delivering a record 20,000 modern apprenticeships for the second successive year, including more than 1,000 in engineering, and planned to create a 25,000 more in 2011-12.

He added that the government's literacy action plan published in October "includes a range of actions from early years through to employment, aimed at eradicating poor literacy across the country".

"The Scottish Government is committed to supporting skills and training across all sectors of the economy," he said.