Some of the most advanced medicines being made in the UK come out of companies you have never heard of, in units you would walk straight past on an industrial estate. These firms make up more than nine in ten of the businesses in the sector. Yet when the national picture of the workforce gets drawn up, it tends to be the big employers, the ones with the staff and the time to answer consultations, whose voice comes through. The smaller companies get left out.
Earlier this year, with backing from Innovate UK, we set out to change that. We spoke to SMEs working on advanced therapies, novel diagnostics and other high-stakes areas, and asked them directly about the skills problems they encounter. The result is a report, Future-Ready: Skills for a Competitive UK Medicines Manufacturing Sector.
This matters because life sciences is one of the priority sectors in the UK’s Industrial Strategy, and the ambition behind it is real. The plan is to expand biomanufacturing, scale up advanced therapies, go further on digital and pull in investment from overseas. Growth like that asks a great deal of the people doing the work. It needs real scientific and analytical skill, and it needs the leadership and commercial sense to turn clever science into products that can actually be made and sold at scale. Employers told us plainly that these are the capabilities they need to grow. And none of it happens without a skills system that works for the firms closest to the work, including the smallest and most specialised. Right now, it doesn’t.
Getting hold of training is hard, and harder than most people outside these businesses realise. Picture a firm with a handful of technicians. Releasing one of them for training can mean slowing or halting a production line. The result: it does not happen. The specialist places people need to train in, clean rooms and the like, are not easy to access. Details of who offers what are scattered and badly signposted, and what you can find in one part of the country may not exist in another.
One employer put it bluntly. Their verdict on the training available was that it was "too fragmented, too difficult… we'll just create our own." The instinct is understandable, but it is also revealing. When the system is too hard to navigate, the responsibility falls back on the employer. For businesses already stretched across production, compliance and commercial pressures, that is a considerable thing to take on. Even apprenticeships, so often held up as the answer, barely reach this part of the sector. Around three-quarters of starts go to large employers, and almost all depend on levy funding that smaller firms struggle to access.
None of this means these employers undervalue training. It means the system is not built with them in mind. A single national template is never going to fit, because what holds one company back is rarely what holds back a firm in another part of the country, even when the two do similar work.
One finding took us by surprise. We expected employers to talk about a shortage of applicants. Mostly, they did not. The bigger problem was job readiness. Graduates arrive with strong academic grounding and then struggle with the everyday business of working. This includes communicating clearly, adapting when plans change, staying steady under pressure and keeping the appetite to learn in a tightly regulated environment. In a manufacturing setting, where a mistake carries real consequences, that gap costs time. Every new starter takes longer to become genuinely useful.
As one employer put it, "there's no lack of candidates… they just don't have experience." Employers described core laboratory techniques, documentation discipline and clean-room behaviours taking several months, sometimes the best part of a year, before someone can work unsupervised. A graduate might arrive with 60 or 70 per cent of what the role needs, leaving the rest to be built on the job. In a regulated environment, that is not just a training issue. It is a quality and compliance risk, and the weight of managing it falls on the experienced staff who can least afford the distraction.
And herein lies the irony. The firm that can least afford to release staff for training is often the same firm left to do the bridging itself, in its own time. For a small company, that is a lot to carry.
So what would help? The report sets out a set of practical recommendations, and the idea behind all of them is largely the same: lessen the friction. Make apprenticeships less of an administrative slog. Open up shared and regional training facilities so firms are not left on their own. Build short, modular courses that fit around a production schedule rather than fighting it. And signpost the whole thing properly, so a company can find its way through without having to become an expert in the system on top of everything else it already does.
None of this is radical. It is what the employers themselves said would make the difference. Get it right and the smallest, most innovative firms in UK medicines manufacturing get a fair shot at the talent they need. Get it wrong and we carry on asking them to grow with one hand tied.
This is the work Cogent Skills exists to do, carrying the voice of industry to the people whose decisions shape it.
The full report is available here.
