In early March, Cambridge University Health Partners convened a meeting to address the shortage of lab technicians locally. The region faces challenges in recruitment, skills mismatches, and a need for more training opportunities at sub-degree levels to meet the demand for essential roles. Prof Dame Athene Donald explores how local investment in growth, including the planned Ox-Cam corridor, will require a skilled workforce, which must include technicians, to support innovation and growth in life sciences and digital sectors.
After the announcement of the Government’s commitment to the Ox-Cam corridor, what needs to be done in the skills arena to ensure there is a workforce ready to make the most of investment in the region? It’s easy simply to focus on the supply of the highly skilled with entrepreneurial skills ready to start new businesses, but can they thrive without a cadre of less-skilled individuals to keep the equipment running and to effect scale-up? Attention needs to be paid to the technicians who are vital but often unseen in such businesses.
The Cambridge cluster is a successful ecosystem of thriving businesses, both large and small, with a particular emphasis on life sciences and digital. Many of these have spun out from the University of Cambridge, and others have been attracted to the area by the presence of a highly educated and skilled workforce. However, it is not all rosy, and many businesses report issues about recruitment and retention, as well as a skills mismatch between what jobs require and who is available. Furthermore, as the recent TPI report on East Anglia looking at issues around the economy and productivity challenges highlighted, there are huge variations as one moves away from Cambridge into the more rural areas, in terms of qualifications and engagement with training.
However, without the right people in the right place, firms will struggle and innovation and productivity will falter. Even basic digital skills are often found to be lacking, with the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) for the region emphasising the urgent need to enhance digital skills across the workforce. In the area of life sciences, and laboratory science more generally, a workshop was recently held by CUHP (Cambridge University Health Partners) with local businesses, HEI and FE providers and the local authority, specifically to try to work out how to improve the supply of technicians.
Part of the challenge in this particular arena, is that ‘technician’ is such a poorly defined term: it can cover anyone from entry level up to someone with a PhD. The UKRI Technician Commitment Action Plan makes this wide range of roles covered very clear. This variation in interpretation in what it means to need a ‘technician’ was very apparent in our discussions and muddies the waters of the issues around supply and demand. The challenges are obviously different, at different levels, as are the solutions.
The local UTC, Cambridge Academy of Science and Technology (CAST), runs a T Level in Laboratory Science but, as so often with T Levels, still struggles to find local businesses willing to take their students on the required twelve-week placements. It was encouraging to hear that of those who started the course, there was 100% retention (to be contrasted with a rate of only 65% nationally across all courses) and all students achieved Merit or above. But CAST could take more students on their course if more placements could be found. I hope this very simple statement made at the workshop by Alastair Easterfield, their Director of Science, will of itself prompt more organisations to consider accepting their students for placements; this should include Cambridge University, who are already on board with taking on some students for placements but could take more. As Alastair pointed out, compared with both the logistics and commitment required to create an apprenticeship place, this is low risk and low cost, but may enable the successful start of a young person’s career in whatever organisation takes them on.
But how should a young person at school know they might want to embark on a career in a laboratory? Our careers advice in schools still, too often, falls short of the Gatsby Benchmarks, so that not all school children get to learn much about the world of work in any formal way. If no one explains to them about what satisfaction they might get out of work in a laboratory, and all they are familiar with are the local shops and garage in some of East Anglia’s small towns and villages, how can they imagine what a lab technician’s role might entail? A role that might be in a major institution, such as the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) or Astra Zeneca, two major local employers of laboratory-based technicians at different levels, but which may not mean a great deal to a pupil in a fenland school with limited resources. The very geography of East Anglia poses its own challenges, characterised as it is by villages and relatively small, dispersed towns, often with high local unemployment, and only containing the relatively small cities of Cambridge and Norwich. This dispersion magnifies the difficulties of transport well-recognized locally: getting to a place of work in one of the larger towns or cities, can be a challenge, with an irregular and uneven bus service and few railway lines.
It became clear from the discussions, the Cambridge ecosystem has a need for more lab technicians and does not have an adequate supply of them at the sub-degree level. ARU does run degree apprenticeship courses for both Laboratory and Data Scientists, but the local Further Education (FE) College does not offer relevant courses in the lab space, pushing employers to use online courses for lower-level apprentices.
As I have already argued elsewhere at a national level, universities – including the University of Cambridge – may and perhaps should feel they have a civic ‘duty’ to take on the challenge of training more apprentice technicians than they themselves will ultimately employ permanently. These would be people who can then go on to fill places in the start-ups and smaller businesses that need them to drive forward innovation. Such a university role would align with the expectation from the Secretary of State, Bridget Philipson, that universities should play a larger role locally, to ‘embed themselves’ in the local region, as she put it late last year.
As the Cambridge ecosystem grows, the many SMEs springing up inevitably possess limited resources to devote to consideration of taking on staff who will need training. This will be true whether they be apprentices, T Level placements or even graduates who need additional specialist training their degree may not have covered. That apprentices, for instance at level 4 or 5 (HNC or HND level), might be a good route for them in terms of the long term will be little consolation as they struggle with the short term. But perhaps these people can and should come with good qualifications from the University or other large employers willing to invest in the future wider good.
Amongst the many issues that Cambridge, Cambridgeshire and the wider East Anglia region face, as identified in the TPI Report, the skills problem must be included and steps taken to improve supply of appropriately qualified individuals. Technicians matter when it comes to innovation in the life sciences, because they are the ones who keep the equipment running, who train newcomers into labs in safe and reproducible practices and who are part of the crucial ‘absorptive capacity’ that allows innovation to diffuse and develop. Cambridge as a city has many infrastructure problems: lab space itself, transport, affordable housing and so on. But human capital is another key strand in terms of infrastructure and needs attention. Lab technicians are just one, but vital part of this if the Cambridge cluster is to deliver its full potential.
One part of the work of Skills England, as its work gets underway, must be to drive coherence across the Higher Education and Further Education sectors. If there is to be a better matching of supply and demand across the technical workforce, attention needs to be paid to the entry-level routes into these roles across the region. Locally, opportunities for training at sub-degree level need as much attention as for those obtaining first and second degrees. It is unreasonable to expect the burgeoning start-ups around Cambridge to be able to train a large enough cohort to sustain their businesses, and others – including universities and established companies – need to step up to create the technical cadre the region needs.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
