Engineers hit by redundancy selling their skills short, say recruiters

Too many engineers, surveyors, designers and architects who have been made redundant in recent months are underselling their skills, according to a new report from specialist recruitment firm Scantec. Job hunters in the engineering and related sectors, say Scantec recruiters, fail to realise how they could transfer their expertise to a different industry sector.

Scantec director Peter Bates said: "The key message is that there are jobs out there for engineers across the UK and the world. We need to explode this gloom and doom. It is not the case that there are 'no jobs.'"

"We speak to engineers who are working at Tesco stacking shelves and they come to us thinking they’re on the scrapheap," he added. "Too often people have the blinkers on and do not see how skilled they are, and how useful those skills are to other sectors."

The other sectors in which engineers' skills would be quite useful are construction, oil and gas, water and the nuclear sector. The first step for engineers to transfertheir skills is to find specialist recruiters.

More engineers have been recruited by overseas firms in recent months than ever by Scantec in the recruitment firm's 19 years of trading. Simultaneously, the number of engineers hired into the nuclear industry is on the rise.

Bates explains: "There is a big demand for skilled engineers in the oil and gas sector in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Nigeria, Singapore and Russia. In the past it was mainly expats we were placing who were comfortable with prospect of living overseas. But increasingly we’re placing more people who’ve never lived abroad before because there are lots of jobs and the money is good."

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