As the UK pharmaceuticals sector looks past its post-pandemic hangover, the backlog in drug approvals by MHRA is also slowly being addressed, meaning that manufacturing is now being scaled up. Hence, in terms of 2024 so far, there has been an increase in engineering vacancies of 8.8% compared to last year.
The World Economic Forum stated recently that over 75% of businesses will be looking to adopt AI across the next 5 years, and the pharmaceuticals industry is at the forefront of that. As part of that engineering will have a key part to play in ensuring quality standards and maximising production, hence this shift towards AI is likely to accelerate the recruitment of Engineers.
Overall, therefore, we’re already seeing these effects with growth in both London and the rest of the UK steadily increasing over the past couple of years. London is estimated to increase its numbers from 31 to 63 for the 2024 fiscal year.
Perhaps because we are seeing an increasing demand from larger pharma companies for a London base, and because of an uptick post covid - London is seeing a faster rate of growth than the rest of the UK as a whole. Focusing more on months and quarterly growth, there appears to be a recurring pattern of higher employment in the first quarter of each year (January to March), followed by a dip in the middle of the year.
2024 (projected) indicates a potential upward trend, with June showing the highest figure (85) across all three years, so we aren’t seeing the same ‘dip’ mid-year. Over the past few years, 2024 has dominated as having the least amount of negative month-on-month percentage change, seeing only three. The most recent data from August shows a 3.9% increase, as opposed to the -9.4% seen in July of this year.
In a sectorial sense, the CRO is expected to see the largest year-on-year change, with a projected increase of 51.7%, and as well as this - its share of engineering vacancies is also anticipated to grow, rising from 11.8% in 2023 to 16.4% in 2024, although remaining the lowest share percentage of the three sectors.
The Pharmaceuticals sector is leading the forecast for engineering with an estimated 431 vacancies but is expected to see a 6.6% decline, going from a 63.2% share of vacancies in 2023 to a 54.3% share in 2024. Biotech is expecting a surge of 27.7% this year, holding a 29.3% share of total vacancies.
In terms of the share size of the engineering vacancies, Specialist fields again lie ahead. This division is expected to see a slight improvement of 17.6% in 2024, Chemical engineering is also set to grow from 15.8% in 2023 to 16.6% in 2024. Mechanical engineering is again, also expected to see an uplift in its share size of the vacancies increasing from 9.2% in 2023 to 9.6% in 2024 (estimated) so while not huge growth, there is some expansion being seen.
Lisa Walker - Head of Engineering (Medical Devices) UK & US Market | Cpl UK