NEWS

By Thierry Delange , Commercial Director, RTC North

Over the last eighteen months, defence has moved from being a specialist policy issue to a much bigger national economic story. We have seen the Strategic Defence Review, a new Defence Industrial Strategy, and growing talk about defence spending rising towards 3% of GDP. Most of the discussion has focused on bigger budgets, new equipment and new technology. But one question has had far less attention: who is actually going to do the work?

That question matters because the workforce numbers are worrying. When you look at the data, the issue is not just a small shortage of specialist staff, it is a much bigger problem.

The scale of the problem

Skills England says around 181,500 people currently work directly in defence. To meet expected growth in just fourteen key occupations, the sector will need about 53,000 more workers by 2035. That is a 58% increase. On top of that, another 29,000 people will be needed simply to replace those who leave or retire. In total, defence could need close to 82,000 extra people over the next decade.

The age and profile of the workforce make this harder. Defence is still heavily male representing 78% of the workforce, compared with 52% across the wider UK economy. The biggest age group is 50 to 59, which means many experienced workers may retire just as demand is increasing. Most new defence jobs will also need higher-level skills. Around 87% of new roles are expected to require Level 4 qualifications or above, especially in software, engineering, welding, electrical work, nuclear engineering and naval architecture. These are exactly the skills other sectors are also trying to recruit.

In plain terms, defence does not just need a few more experts, it needs a much bigger, broader and more skilled workforce. At the moment, the training pipeline does not look strong enough to meet that need. Engineering higher education entrants grew by only 7% between 2021 and 2023. Digital apprenticeships at Level 4 and 5 grew much faster, by 82%, which is positive, but the growth is uneven and does not always match the jobs defence most urgently needs to fill.

We have heard this warning before

None of this is new, the UK has been having versions of the same skills debate for as long as I can remember.

Report after report has made the same basic point. Dearing in 1997, The National Skills Task Force, Leitch in 2006, Wolf in 2011, Sainsbury in 2016, Augar in 2019...each one said, in different ways, that the skills system is too slow, too driven by what providers want to offer, and too disconnected from what employers and the economy need. Each review was meant to fix the problem, yet here we are again.

The Apprenticeship Levy was introduced in 2017 to help solve this. It now raises around £2.7 billion a year, but much of the money is not used by the businesses it was designed to support. Some employers also use the funding for higher-level training for existing staff, rather than for the entry-level training that could bring new people into the workforce.

So when Skills England says the system will now be more employer-led and better aligned to economic need, I want to believe it but it is reasonable to ask a simple question, if the system has struggled to respond for three decades, why should we assume, it will now respond quickly enough now?

What is different this time?

There are some positive signs. The £182 million defence skills package linked to the 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy is important. It includes five new Defence Technical Excellence Colleges, a Defence Universities Alliance, and a proposed Defence Skills Passport. The Skills Passport could matter because it may help people move more easily between the armed forces, defence companies and the wider supply chain without having to start again with new qualifications each time.

That would be a useful shift as it recognises that defence careers are not always a straight line. People may move sideways, retrain, come in from the armed forces, or bring useful skills from other industries.

But the basics of the system have not changed enough. Apprenticeship standards are still centrally approved, and that process has often been slow. Only three new apprenticeship standards have been added for defence-priority roles since August 2022, even though 52 relevant standards already exist. Funding also still flows through much the same system, even if the name changes from the Apprenticeship Levy to the Growth and Skills Levy.

Radical change needs a radical response, not another five-year plan

Here's the bit I think gets missed entirely in the debate. Defence isn't just facing a skills gap, it's facing a world that is changing faster than at any point most of us have worked through, and that change is about to accelerate again. Autonomous systems, AI-enabled warfare, cyber and space capability, a geopolitical environment that rewrites procurement priorities in months rather than years. Against that backdrop, expecting a skills system that has needed years to approve a single new standard to keep pace, let alone get ahead of it, isn't ambitious, it's unrealistic, and thirty years of evidence tells us so.

If the pace of change in defence is genuinely radical, the response has to be too. Not a faster version of the same old reform cycle.

A few provocations, I’m genuinely open to being wrong

I don't have the finished answer here, and I'd rather put out some rough ideas and be challenged on them than wait for a polished position that never arrives. For what they're worth:

What if industry consortia, primes and their supply chains together, were trusted to own and update modular, stackable skills standards in real time, the way software gets shipped in continuous releases, rather than waiting on a national body to approve each change on an annual cycle?

What if the Level 7 age restriction was scrapped outright for defence-critical occupations, on the basis that ex-forces personnel and mid-career changers are the fastest, most defence-literate supply line available.

What if a slice of defence procurement spend itself became the skills lever with contractual obligations on primes to train and develop supply chain workforce as a condition of contract, in the way social value clauses already work, rather than skills funding sitting in a separate pot administered by a separate department?

And what if the intermediaries closest to the SMEs actually doing this work, regional bodies who understand a specific supply chain, not a national quango covering every sector at once, were given the resource and the mandate to move at the speed local employers need, rather than the speed a national system can manage?

I'm not claiming any of these are fully formed, or even right. But I'd rather have that conversation now than watch us mark the fortieth year of making the same argument to the same effect. Defence has finally got the investment case it's been asking for. Whether it gets the workforce to match is still very much an open question and I'd genuinely like to hear what you think the answer looks like.

If the UK's defence and advanced manufacturing ambitions are to succeed, building the workforce of the future must be part of the conversation. It's a challenge we're passionate about at RTC North, and one we're actively recruiting for as we expand our STEM and skills support team. Vacancy can be viewed here.

Sources: Skills England, Sector Skills Needs Assessment – Defence, 2026; Policy Connect, "A 'War-fighting Ready' Workforce? Tackling UK Defence Skills Shortages in the 2025 Strategic Defence Review"; Skills England blog, "Building the skills system Britain needs"; House of Commons Library, Skills policy in England; Department for Education/MOD, Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 skills package announcement; The Manufacturer, "The Apprenticeship Levy: an exercise in failure"; Wikipedia, Leitch Review.