Aerospace fights for young recruits as AI drains talent pool

By Joanna Plucinska and Shivansh Tiwary

FARNBOROUGH, England, July 24 (Reuters) - For Hassan Butt, a 17-year-old British student volunteering at the Farnborough airshow this week, there was nothing cooler than watching the planes and thinking about the physics that kept them airborne. 

"Everyone when they're kids, they look up, they see the planes flying and they think, damn..." he said as he fielded questions from passersby at a stand. His dream was to pursue a career in aerospace and engineering with a focus on missiles.  

Looking across the hall, there was no shortage of stalls and displays and aerospace recruitment campaigns seeking to tap into that enthusiasm and lure him and other potential recruits from Generation Z and Alpha.

Butt was a perfect candidate, but industry bodies and companies said there were not enough like him out there. The UK aerospace and defence sector is facing a shortage of around 10,000 specialized engineers a year — with AI and other newer technologies sucking up talent.

More than 50% of licensed aerospace engineers are older than 50 in Britain; fewer than 10% are under 30, a March report by the Royal Aeronautical Society showed. The UK sector has grown 31% in the last decade, but the talent pipeline has not kept pace, trade group ADS said.

"We in the aerospace industry have been experiencing a shortage of skilled workers for some time ... despite the industry growing year on year for the past 10 years," Kevin Craven, chief executive of aerospace and defence trade group ADS, said.

He added that innovations in flying taxis and sustainability could help to coax younger engineers into signing up.

CONTESTS AND TOP GUN DISPLAYS LURE RECRUITS

The sector faces a record order backlog. Aerospace giants including Boeing and Airbus are working hard to crank out more planes, but are watching their expert engineers inching towards retirement.

Many companies in the sector scrapped feeder apprenticeship programmes that support longer-term careers in cost-saving measures a few years ago. Those have largely been replaced by entry-level jobs or graduate schemes, many of them pushed by the stalls and campaigns at this week's event. 

Elsewhere at the show, there were engine-building exercises and Top Gun-like flying displays, all designed to draw young recruits in.

The competition to attract them is fierce. Other sectors requiring similar engineering skills have a lower barrier to entry and often pay higher salaries, especially in technology, experts say.

"If you're an engineer coming out of Purdue or MIT or any other of the premier aerospace engineering programmes, you might say maybe I'll go to Anthropic or OpenAI as opposed to Boeing or Airbus," said Jerrold Lundquist, consultant and managing director of advisory firm The Lundquist Group.

The UK government is hoping renewed investment in defence, tied to the war in Ukraine, can help boost the appeal of joining the sector, as it develops unmanned drones such as BAE Systems' Brontanax. 

ADS said the aerospace, defence and security sectors added 46.8 billion pounds ($62.4 billion) to the UK economy last year.  

Another 17-year-old at the event, Molly Haydon, was just as keen as Hassan Butt to join in. But she said more needed to be done outside of the airshow to attract students, in particular young women like her.

"I think they need to educate more young people on it and to get them more knowledge that there are still jobs available in the sector for everyone," she said. 

($1 = 0.7506 pounds)

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska, Shivansh Tiwary, Tim Hepher and Cassell Bryan-Low; Editing by Andrew Heavens)