NMI’s Derek Boyd discusses the skills agenda with Indro Mukerjee, CEO of C-MAC MicroTechnology and Chairman of the Electronics Sector Strategy Group for Skills.

By way of an introduction, can you tell us a bit about your current role at C-MAC?

I joined C-MAC at the beginning of 2006 after being approached by the investors behind the business. For any of your readers who don’t know, C-MAC provides a design and manufacturing service to automotive and aerospace companies that need high reliability components, from a modular form to complex circuits. 

By concentrating on high reliability, and coming out of markets where C-MAC couldn’t or wouldn’t be a strong leader, we have become very successful. By staying focused, C-MAC is and has been growing very nicely with a good track record and is very well set for the future.

So much for the day job. Can you describe your involvement with the Electronics Sector Strategy Group for Skills and tell us what got you interested in skills requirements for the electronics industry?

It’s a journey I feel very passionately about. Prior to joining C-MAC, I had been running a global multi billion dollar Philips semiconductor business and based in the Netherlands. Coming back to the UK after nearly ten years away, I was struck by two things. 

Firstly, that the days of large British electronics companies with big brands and ever bigger Training & Development schemes had gone. Secondly, that we’ve got some incredibly talented people here; people who can beat the world at the very specific things they do. 

C-MAC is a good example of this. It’s exactly the type of business that I think does, or should do very well in the UK, because it relies on specialist engineering skills, what I call ‘electronics craftsmanship’. 

Putting these two observations together, I started to ask myself ‘What will happen if we don’t continue to learn and maintain those skills?’ We, as a company, won’t have the skills we need to run the business in twenty years time. And we, as a country, will look back to see that the industry we have known and loved has gone. 

That was when I decided to get stuck into skills. I commissioned a piece of work for my own company, which highlighted that science and engineering warranted extra focus. To facilitate that, I created a number of round tables using press and some industry contacts that I had. It was at that point that I was approached by the Electronics Leadership Council (ELC). They said: “What you’re doing is the kind of thing that we like; would you consider being part of ELC?” That’s what got me into the whole thing of what is the UK today. What I discovered is that it’s a much more complex environment than I had ever imagined!

For one thing, it’s full of quangos and other bodies. The people in those quangos are working just as hard as anyone else and it’s not their fault that things aren’t happening as quickly as they need to; it’s a management issue. I became determined to work with the ELC in talking to politicians and senior people to make the system more efficient. That’s when I was invited to be the centre of the thing and asked if I’d be Chairman of the Electronics Sector Strategy Group. I didn’t say yes immediately. I wanted to find out who had skin in this game; who would be happy if the mission succeeds and who wouldn’t give a damn? I was quite surprised by what I saw. There seemed to be lots of people paying lip service to the skills agenda; making careers, getting promoted and getting funding by talking about things at too high an aggregation level. Too much politics and not enough grass-roots action. 

What proved much more motivating for me was the link into Semta  which demonstrated a very professional, passionate and determined engagement to make the mission work at grass roots level. Crucially, Semta was going after specifics rather than generalisations.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with the skills agenda. We’re trying to set specific targets like: ‘how many people can we get engaged with the Sector Compact ?’ and ‘how can we take them from Level 1 to the Level 2 or 3 skills you need on a daily basis?’ I want to strip out as much of the politics as possible and get as many real people involved in real business as I can. Because, ultimately, with initiatives come results. 

Going back to those specifics, what do you see as the key opportunities for the UK?

I think there are two. Britain has the potential to be a hugely successful advanced manufacturing nation. By advanced manufacturing, I mean manufacturing with high value-add, good margins and highly skilled people, not massively high volume, ultra-low margin non-differentiated manufacturing. We have fantastic skills in this area and the character to match. I’ve lived and worked in three continents and I can honestly say that British engineers have the resilience, capability and natural talent to excel in this area. The other specific opportunity that I see for our industry is in advanced design and innovation. The UK start-up scene has been a vibrant example of this; outside the US it’s probably the best in the world. Pooling the two, we have the potential to create a fantastic sustainable industry here, but we need the skills to go with it.

Turning to the refresh of the sector skills agreement, can you explain why you think that’s important and why companies should engage in that process?

I see skills requirements as a continuum, which goes all the way from the shop floor to the highest advanced design lab. The Sector Skills Agreement needs to acknowledge that, as well as the fact that the days when you could make your career in one company from start to finish are long gone. What we’re crying out for is transferable skills and initiatives like the Electronics Skills Foundation that we’re discussing with NMI.  

Transferable skills, advanced manufacturing, innovation and design – those are the things that we need for electronics. And that’s a message that we need to get across to NMI members. Even if they’re only a part of it themselves, the leaders of the industry need to see the whole supply chain and to understand that for their business to flourish in the long-term, the whole sector has to be bigger in the UK.  

The other point I’d like to make is that you don’t just need operations and engineering people. You need to have people at senior level who understand about strategy, brand management and finance. How many SMEs today have this spectrum of skills? How many can really get a focus on their key market areas and differentiation? This might be controversial, but the issue with a lot of British businesses isn’t the technology or the creative idea; it’s the commercial and business execution. That’s why we need soft skills like leadership, brand management and finance.          

Ok, let’s project ourselves six to nine months into the future and imagine we’ve developed a sector skills agreement that captures most of the points we’ve been talking about. How confident are you of Semta’s ability to engage the partners and Government to deliver on those needs? A big concern of mine is that we engage a lot of companies in this process, raise expectations… and then nothing happens. 

As a businessman, I completely understand your concern. The one thing you can’t do is to make a big speech to your customer and then let them down. That’s why I think it’s important to have this engagement with companies at the right level and to ensure that the Semta engagement is appropriate, well-trained, well organised and that the follow through leads to results.  

The engagement feedback I’ve seen so far has been very encouraging. There are positive signs that companies are going through a training and development journey. I think that as long as we keep the level of dialogue to the real, hard-nosed business requirements, then we’ll do well. What we want to do is enable up-skilling of our people in the key areas that can help companies as the market recovers. So in this six, nine or twelve month period that you’re talking about, we’re expecting to see British companies starting to benefit from these up-skilling initiatives.   

So how does the Sector Strategy Group best achieve all this? We’re trying to pursue an up-skilling agenda here and to find programmes for a massively disintegrated community that can, to some extent, replace corporate structures that don’t exist in the UK any more. Are you confident that we’re going to be able to achieve that should these types of things emerge from the sector skills re-fresh process? 

I’m confident and I’m optimistic. Because: number one – if we keep it specific and have the kind of engagement we’ve stated, then I think we’re going to get better; number two – we have to be positive, practical and determined as opposed to cynical, overly general and political. Electronics is fundamentally a positive person’s industry after all. We’re always investing in chips, designs, boards or circuits long before they go to market. You have to be positive or what’s the point?

People need to do the same with the skills agenda. You should engage with it, find out more, talk more and discuss it at meetings and conferences. Everything we’re doing can be enhanced or improved upon in some way, but for that to happen business leaders need to get involved. 

Thank you for your comments and that rousing call to action. Many of our members will know that we've been working hard on the skills agenda with heightened intensity throughout 2009 however they may not know that we have been working with existing initiatives and organisations (such as Semta) to meet the challenges head on. It's pleasing to report that through our combined efforts we will be making positive announcements throughout 2010.