Health check: the UK car industry's recruitment conundrum

According to Doyle, that is now changing: “We have the battery knowledge here – Oxford, Imperial and various other universities have incredible battery departments – but what Britishvolt allows us to do is [take that] creative, innovative science that we come up with in the UK and, rather than it going abroad to be made in someone else’s factory, we’ve got an opportunity to pipeline that into a UK company.”

Car manufacturers are dealing with the skills shortage in different ways. At Bentley, training internally is important, according to Fontaine: “We know there are a lot of kids out there that might not be able to afford a fully fledged university degree. We decided to set up digital apprenticeships. We need software developers and app developers. These skills are rare, so we’re trying to build them up by getting the kids that love to work with this stuff into the tech field. It works really well.”

In 2019 Ford launched D-Ford, a ‘human-centred’ design area of the company that aims to shake up how the company mothership not only views the world but also how it operates; it’s a forward-looking department that’s attempting to predict what’s coming in five to 10 years’ time.

Usha Raghavachari is innovation lab director at D-Ford in London, Melbourne and São Paulo. She said: “100% of my [external] hires have come from outside the automotive industry. We’re moving from this very industrial, hardware-focused offering to thinking about software services, and that whole ecosystem that we’re designing for our customers.

To do that, we need folks with very different skill sets. I’ve got 200,000 car people already inside the company, and they’re very capable, very accomplished and generally brilliant, in lots of different ways. We need people with digital backgrounds.”

However, as car manufacturers look to expand, it’s not just a skills shortage headwind they face. There are also huge challenges around attracting the brightest minds in the first place, because automotive start-up companies can offer an attractive, alternative proposition to the best graduates. While OEMs can give the reassurances of a 100-year-old company, they can’t compete with the new-kid-on-the-block vibe that the more youthful, less bureaucratic start-ups bring.

Remuneration isn’t the only driver nowadays, as Doyle explains: “There isn’t an HR director in the country who hasn’t looked at the benefits package and the rewards. That’s a given: salaries are competitive and packages are competitive.”

According to Doyle, it’s the OEM’s customs that need to change. “The culture within a business is something that OEMs really need to look at.”

OEMs aren’t completely without their own recruitment firepower, though. In days gone by, departments like D-Ford might have been thought of as a skunkworks area, with engineers beavering away after-hours and over weekends to deliver fanciful project cars. But with D-Ford, this is brought much more in-house, to give the reassurance of Ford coupled with the edge of a start-up.

“We have one foot inside the company and one foot outside,” says Raghavachari. “Bringing in that external perspective is absolutely essential because of the pace of change in digital data.”

At Ford, employees have a vast, multinational corporation behind them, with a real chance to “make a difference to millions of consumers all over the world”. Bentley, meanwhile, is part of the Volkswagen Group. This, says Fontaine, gives new recruits “the power of this huge, 660,000 [employee] company in the background and easily be able to see the internal job postings. To be able to move between the brands has a high appeal.” And thanks to the relatively compact size of Bentley (for an OEM), the apprentices have a direct line to Fontaine, who is a member of the board.