Not enough young people are becoming engineers, according to Russell Dalglish, managing director at global technical resourcing provider Talascend.

Dalglish told Recruiter: “For the past 20 years, we have not seen young people going into engineering in the numbers we have seen previously. Engineering is viewed as standing around outside with a hard hat on in not nice conditions.

“From the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s, kids were not going into engineering. There were not as many engineering projects going on around the world as there are today. That has led to a shortfall of available talent, which is particularly affecting engineering talent.”

For more from Russell Dalglish, see the latest edition of Recruiter’s engineering sector focus (9 June).