Skills Crisis Looms – Training Key To Success

Our industry should be clear that not enough engineers are being trained. This is the view of dB Broadcast, who recently hosted a SMPTE event based on "Engineering Training in the Broadcast Industry".

This event was well attended by representatives from manufacturers and suppliers across a wide spectrum of the broadcast industry.

In the fast changing world of broadcast engineering, ensuring that there is a pool of suitably skilled and qualified personnel is becoming a hot topic. The training of design, project implementation and operational staff is becoming more important for the future; the changing nature of broadcast technology makes up-to-date skills an absolute necessity.

It has been estimated by the BBC that around 60% of engineers currently in post are within ten years of retirement, so the problem is set to get rapidly worse.

The recruitment problem is one shared with other technology and manufacturing sectors, but according to a recent IET Report, companies specialising in broadcast and media have lower than average recruitment levels. In particular, the greatest difficulty is found in recruiting engineers with 5–10 years' experience.

"Essentially there are four ways to get the skills we need," says Tom Swan, Sales and Marketing Director at dB. "We can recruit them from other companies, take on graduates straight from college and train them in SI roles, train engineers ourselves or we can recruit contract engineers, project managers and consultants for specific requirements and timescales. We currently have an availability of 75 people in our UK pool. While dB uses all of these approaches, the training approach has been especially important. Around 30% of dB employees have been through one of dB's training programmes."

Image: Tom Swan, Sales and Marketing Director, dB Broadcast.

www.dbbroadcast.co.uk

(JP/MH)