When Laura Bunn left school at 16 to become an apprentice fitter in an engineering firm, the teachers at her sixth form college told her she was making a mistake. Nine years on, does she feel that her decision was wrong?

“I wouldn’t change it for the world,” says Bunn, a development engineer in the small turbines section of Siemens. “I did well at school, but I wanted to start at the beginning and learn the basics.” She is now studying one day a week for a BEng in mechanical engineering at Sheffield Hallam University.

William Murden, one of about 16 apprentices at Peter Brotherhood, an engineering company specialising in steam turbines and gas compressors in Peterborough, left school after his A levels. “All of my friends went to university,” he says. “I’m not missing out. I’m progressing at a different pace from them because I’ve gone down a different route.” He is also studying as part of his apprenticeship and will end up with an HND at the end of his four years.

While Bunn and Murden are success stories in the energy sector, the overall picture is not as rosy. While these apprentices have bright futures, the lure of a career in the area isn’t obvious to enough jobseekers and employers. “There is a slow willingness to look at the issues and to manage critical skills in the sector,” says George Ritchie, the senior vice-president of SembCorp Utilities UK, a company on Teesside. While there is a shortage of skills across engineering in the region (he quotes an analysis by One North East, the regional development agency, that says that the industry needs 400 new apprentices a year to sustain itself – at present it takes on about 250 a year), the energy sector has its own issues.

“The future of the energy industry is going to be the decommissioning of power stations and the building of new ones,” he says. “Where do you get those engineering and construction skills?” He says that not enough engineers are being trained and estimates that UK engineering loses 1,000 engineers a year who could be retrained to work in the energy sector.

William Banks, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Strathclyde, identifies nuclear power as a problem area in energy. He predicts that the UK will have to rely on skills from the United States and Japan. “The last university courses on building nuclear power stations were around in the 1960s and were phased out because no one would need to build them again for a long time,” he says. Now, with a resurgence in the popularity of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, employers are taking on more apprentices but universities are lagging behind. While Strathclyde is considering offering nuclear energy courses, it does not yet do so.

So how does the energy sector make itself a more attractive career option? Partly it is to do with improving the image of engineering. Manufacturing in the North East, for example, is reputed to be dead, Ritchie says. Teesside is buoyant and cannot find enough engineers. He says that the Government, industry and education must take equal responsibility for improving skills, which must involve developing programmes to encourage unemployed people into careers in engineering.

As for energy in particular, the growing need for green energy makes it an exciting, innovative sector. SembCorp, for example, has just opened a £60 million biomass power station on Teesside that derives 40 per cent of its energy from recycled timber andclaims to save 200,000 tonnes of CO a fossil fuel power station.

Bunn also knows that her future is secure. “People are always going to need energy. It’s just going to change.”

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