SiteIt's Monday morning at a machine shop on the edge of Derby. The five-axis machining centre has stopped with a spindle alarm. The job on the bed is a batch of brackets for a customer who audits everything.
Your best setter-engineer handed in their notice on Friday. They're off to one of the big employers in the city for more money and a pension you can't match. Your other engineer is good on the presses but has never touched the spindle drive on this machine.
Call it Derby in one scene. The work is world class. So is the competition for the people who keep it running.
A city that makes things
Derby leans on manufacturing harder than most places. In 2024 manufacturing accounted for 22,000* of the city's 138,000* employee jobs. That's 15.9%*, against 11.6%* for the East Midlands and 7.3%* for Great Britain (Nomis, ONS labour market profile).
Put another way, more than one job in seven in the city is in a factory. Compare that with Birmingham, where it's one in twenty (Nomis). We looked at Birmingham in engineering work in Birmingham.
Rail: track and train
When the government named Derby as the home of Great British Railways in March 2023, it called the city "Europe's largest rail hub" (GOV.UK). The leader of Derby City Council, quoted in the same release, said the city is the only one in the UK to have built rolling stock continuously since 1840.
The train building goes on. In September 2026 the government backed a deal for 29* new battery-electric TransPennine Express trains, to be built at Derby's Litchurch Lane works. The release says it will support more than 350* skilled jobs in Derby, plus 40* apprentices and 40* students (GOV.UK). HS2's trains are also due to be built in Derby and Newton Aycliffe (GOV.UK).
What does a rail works need from maintenance? Long assembly halls with overhead cranes, jigs and lifting beams. Welding sets and fume extraction. Paint and shot blast booths. Test tracks and static test rigs. And around the big works, a supply chain of fabricators, machine shops and cable makers, each with their own kit to keep going. A lot of that kit is lifting equipment, so the LOLER exam cycle never stops.
Aerospace: engines and precision
The other half of the story is aero engines. Government releases describe Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engines as "assembled and tested in Derby" (GOV.UK). In November 2025, big Airbus orders at the Dubai Airshow were for aircraft fitted with Rolls-Royce engines made in Derby (GOV.UK).
Aerospace work asks a different thing of an engineer. Five-axis machining centres. Grinding and EDM. Coordinate measuring machines. Heat treatment furnaces. Clean areas and tight temperature control. Customers who want every repair recorded and every machine proven back to spec before it cuts a part.
A fitter can be brilliant on a crane and still be the wrong person for a spindle fault on a machining centre. The reverse is also true.
Where the smaller sites get squeezed
Here's our view. Derby's big employers are good news for the city and hard news for the sites around them.
When a major contract lands, the big works hire. They pay well, offer training and look good on a CV. Your engineers notice. Skills England expects an estimated 101,000* workers to leave advanced manufacturing's priority jobs between 2025 and 2035, and they will need replacing. It also says most of those jobs face demand from other growing sectors, which makes people harder to attract and keep (Skills England).
So the gap usually opens without warning. A resignation on a Friday. A retirement nobody planned for. A long-term sickness. And the machine that only one person really understood stops the following week.
The cost of that gap is easy to underrate. In aerospace work, a breakdown can mean a scrapped part with hours of machine time already in it, a missed slot with a customer, and a stack of paperwork to prove the machine is right again. In rail supply, one late assembly can hold up a whole build sequence. Put your own figures on a week of waiting for the right person. Then compare it with the cost of keeping someone lined up.
We cover how to hold on to your people in keeping good engineers when the site down the road pays more. For the longer term, growing your own through apprentices is the only route that adds to the pool instead of moving people round it.
Get the match right
When you do need outside help, be exact about the job. "Engineer needed" gets you whoever is free. "Controls engineer, Heidenhain or Siemens, spindle drive alarm on a five-axis machine" gets you someone who can fix it. Some faults belong with the machine maker, and some don't. Our guide to the machine maker's engineer or a local engineer helps you decide.
What to do on Monday
- List the machines on your site that only one person can fix. Those are your Derby-sized risks.
- Write down the exact skills each one needs, down to the control system.
- Talk to your best engineers about what would make them stay before a recruiter does.
- Line up an outside engineer for each of those skills, and get them inducted while things are quiet.
* Employee job counts and shares (ONS Business Register and Employment Survey 2024, via Nomis), the train order figures and the 101,000 replacement estimate correct as of 14 October 2026. Check the Derby labour market profile, GOV.UK and the Skills England sector assessment for the latest.