Manufacturing giant Dyson has announced a £250 million investment into the firm’s Wiltshire headquarters, doubling the size of the plant and tripling the number of engineers employed on the site. To date, this will be the largest expansion plan in the company’s history and is expected to create new positions for around 3,000 engineers in the local area.
The plans for the expansion have been in the making for around two years now, and Sir James Dyson believes that planning consent will soon be granted. He says; “If that goes ahead, we hope to build it by 2015. We would also like to be well on the way to our 3,000 engineer target by then.”
The new facilities will be catered towards Dyson’s research and development (R&D) aims, and will feature laboratories ranging over four buildings in which engineers will focus on improving existing products and also creating new ones entirely. In order to achieve the desired results Dyson have drafted in the architect who designed the existing headquarters, Chris Wilkinson of Wilkinson Eyre.
Yet while Sir James is confident that the property will meet expectations, he remains concerned about the feasibility of finding the requisite number of engineering graduates to meet the company’s targets. Last year, he called on the government to channel increased funds into programmes allowing students and school pupils access to affordable courses in order to allow the country’s current strong growth in manufacturing to continue.
Sir James reinforced this sentiment in the announcement of the Wiltshire expansion, saying; “We really need the government to take up the cudgels on this – as a country, we need an extra 87,000 engineers a year to meet demand.
“There’s no shortage of engineers in the Far East: 40 per cent of all graduates from Singapore University are engineers, and even the Philippines produces twice as many engineers as us.
“Either we expand here or we will be forced to do it in the Far East, which would be a real shame.”
As a marker of its determination to assist in the training of new engineers, Dyson has established ties with a number of universities, as Sir James holds British academic institutions in high regard. Furthermore, the firm will be offering new recruits a signing on bonus of between £2,500 and £3,500 each in order to attract a larger number of highly skilled applicants.
With manufacturing firms continually seeking to expand, it seems that Britain must address the shortage of engineers so as to not limit growth. However, the question is whether this is an issue for the government or for private firms to tackle.
