IN Brief:
- Defence employers aim to provide 40,000 youth opportunities annually by 2030, rising to 50,000 by 2035.
- Apprenticeships are due to reach at least 14,000 young people, with work experience and related pathways expanding by at least 25%.
- Skills England projects 53,000 additional workers may be required in priority defence occupations by 2035, before replacement demand.
The Ministry of Defence and major UK defence employers have agreed to expand routes into apprenticeships, work experience, training and employment, with 40,000 opportunities for young people targeted each year by 2030 and 50,000 by 2035. The agreement brings together companies spanning aerospace, land systems, missiles, shipbuilding, electronics, software and defence services.
The commitment will feed into the forthcoming Industrial Strategy Defence Jobs Plan and includes a target of at least 14,000 young people in defence apprenticeships by 2035. Participating employers also plan to increase work experience placements and routes for young people not in employment, education or training by at least 25%, alongside a quarter more careers, STEM and community engagement activity.
The companies involved include Airbus, Babcock, BAE Systems, Helsing, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, Navantia, Palantir, QinetiQ, Rolls-Royce, Safran and Thales. They have also agreed a “no wrong door” approach under which, with an applicant’s consent, suitable candidates can be directed towards opportunities elsewhere in the defence supply chain when the original employer cannot place them.
The workforce requirement behind the agreement is substantial. Skills England and the Ministry of Defence project employment demand across 14 priority defence occupations to rise by around 53,000 workers between 2025 and 2035 under the central scenario. A further 29,000 people may need to be replaced as existing workers leave those occupations, taking combined expansion and replacement demand to around 82,000.
Those occupations are weighted towards advanced technical skills. Skills England says 87% of projected additional employment in the priority roles requires qualifications at level 4 or above, while digital literacy, numeracy, problem solving and decision making are prominent across the skills profile. The assessment also warns that the projections are indicative and that artificial intelligence could materially change demand in some occupations.
The constraint is therefore not simply recruitment volume. Machining, welding, electronics assembly, software engineering, systems integration, test, maintenance and quality assurance all depend on workers who can operate within tightly controlled technical and regulatory environments. Security requirements, configuration control and product assurance add further layers of training before a new employee can contribute fully to programme delivery.
Apprenticeships remain particularly relevant because they combine formal learning with direct exposure to production and engineering processes. A trainee entering an aerospace, munitions or electronics business can build experience around the tooling, documentation and acceptance requirements used on real programmes rather than learning only generic manufacturing skills. That helps employers develop capability aligned with their own production systems while giving apprentices a clearer route into permanent technical roles.
Work experience addresses an earlier point in the pipeline. Defence employers compete with energy, automotive, civil aerospace and technology companies for many of the same engineers and digital specialists, while some young people may have little visibility of the range of civilian roles available in defence. Structured placements can widen that pool, although their value depends on whether they lead into apprenticeships, technical education or employment rather than remaining isolated engagement exercises.
The agreement builds on a £182 million defence skills package announced previously and sits alongside wider investment through the Defence Investment Plan. The Ministry of Defence says about 462,000 people already work in roles related to UK defence, giving the sector a large existing workforce but also a sizeable replacement burden as experienced staff retire or move into other industries.
Scaling training at the same pace as procurement will require capacity inside employers as well as colleges and universities. Apprentices need experienced supervisors, workshop access and protected training time. Smaller suppliers can face particular difficulty because the same engineers needed to train new staff are often those carrying the heaviest production workloads. Expanding recruitment without expanding training capacity risks moving the bottleneck rather than removing it.
The central demand forecast also carries uncertainty. Skills England presents the 53,000 additional worker figure as an indicative projection, with an alternative scenario producing substantially lower growth. Faster adoption of artificial intelligence could reduce demand in some digital roles while increasing demand in others, and the final shape of the Defence Investment Plan will influence which programmes require the largest workforce increases.
The useful measures will therefore be conversion and retention rather than the number of initial opportunities announced. By 2030, employers will need to show how many participants progress into apprenticeships, technical qualifications and sustained employment, and whether recruitment is reaching the occupations where production constraints are most acute. The 2035 target extends the pipeline further, but the workforce required for current manufacturing expansion has to begin training well before then.