To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to recruit (a) more engineers and (b) intelligence specialists in the armed forces.
Answered on
19 June 2018
The Armed Forces are proactively recruiting and training individuals as engineers and intelligence specialists to meet the needs of Defence. There is a competitive market for such skills and we have introduced a range of measures to support our recruitment and retention efforts. These include remunerative measures such as targeted Golden Hellos and enhanced bursary schemes; the use of specialist recruiting teams, enhanced digital marketing campaigns, pioneering lateral entry at more senior grades for trained professionals and accelerated apprenticeship schemes.
In addition, and distinct from recruiting, the Ministry of Defence is fully engaged in youth STEM outreach activity as part of the UK national effort, to ensure that the talent pipeline has sufficient numbers from which then to recruit. This is underpinned by the launch of the Defence Youth STEM engagement strategy in 2016, and subsequent support to cross-Government initiatives such as the Department for Transport led Year of Engineering and the Department for Education led STEM oversight board.