Developing key “employability” skills is integral to winning the war for talent in the engineering sector, according to Nigel Whitehead, group managing director at BAE Systems.

Unveiling the BAE Systems Skills 2020 strategy, which outlines the action the company needs to take to operate successfully over the next decade, at the offices of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Whitehead told delegates that the firm had noticed a big difference between people aged 22 that have been through apprenticeship schemes over a four-year period in the BAE Systems environment and graduates fresh out of university.

“We teach our apprentices what it’s like to be in a workplace, to give and take constructive criticism and what people expect of you in terms of your behaviours, of how to work in a workplace environment.

“We already work with an outsourced recruitment agency where we have imparted to them the first filter of what we require in terms of employability on leadership. We will continue to work with recruitment organisations to help understand the selection criteria.

“We are learning in that process and are at an early stage in that journey. I think we will have to refine that where we all have the same language and we can measure the same things.

“I guarantee that in 10 years’ time we will be listing employability attributes and our way of measuring them as a standard way of doing business.”