Recruiters need to deliver on consultants' career expectations to help ease the skills shortage in the sector, according to Richard Lawrance, managing director of engineering specialist Resource Solutions.

"There is a shortage of good recruitment consultants and there is also a shortage of companies that take rookies through to becoming a good consultant," Lawrance told Recruiter.

"There isn't a shortage of people coming into the industry but a shortage of opportunities that deliver on people's expectations. A lot of people drop out en route and there are a lot of scarred people out there."

He says the industry is losing out on good candidates because nobody is delivering a good experience. "The sector has to take responsibility or it won't attract the right people and it won't be able to exorcise the stereotype of what a recruitment consultant is."

The Reading-based firm opened an internal training and development facility at the beginning of May to tackle the problem. It offers consultants a set menu of training, as well as some prescriptive training to ensure all employees are up to a certain level in all skills.

The company is also turning its attention to the skills shortage in the engineering sector. "We need to make engineering a sexy career again to overtake IT — it's a branding issue. In other countries engineers are put on a pedestal. In the UK there are much fewer engineering qualifications, more modern subjects are more prominent and this must be reversed."

Lawrance says companies need to sell themselves on the projects they are working on. He says this would attract engineers, who will sometime change jobs to help make their CVs look more interesting.