Manufacturing in the West Midlands: what the numbers show

It's Tuesday night on an industrial estate off the M6. The press line has stopped on a hydraulic fault. Your fitter is on holiday. The agency you rang last month sent someone who had never seen a press brake.

You ring round. The good engineers you know are all booked. One is at the car plant down the road. Another is covering nights at a warehouse in Coventry. A third has gone contract and is in Derby until Christmas.

None of this is bad luck. The West Midlands has more manufacturing than most of the country, and every one of those sites wants the same people you do.

The region still makes things

Start with the official count. In the ONS business survey for 2024, manufacturing made up 9.6%* of employee jobs in the West Midlands. Across Great Britain the figure was 7.3%* (Nomis, ONS labour market profile).

That gap matters more than it looks. A couple of points on a percentage, spread over a whole region, is a lot of factories. Every one of them has motors, drives, conveyors and presses that will stop one day.

The spread across the region isn't even. Some places run well above the average:

• Solihull: 15,000* manufacturing jobs, 10.3%* of all employee jobs (Nomis)
• Rugby: 11.1%* (Nomis)
• Coventry: 14,000* jobs, 8.6%* (Nomis)
• Birmingham: 28,000* jobs, but only 5.0%* of a much bigger city (Nomis)

So Birmingham has the most factory jobs in raw numbers, while the towns around it lean harder on making things. We look at the city itself in engineering work in Birmingham.

Cars, and what came after

The region's pull on car making has grown, not shrunk. An ONS study found the West Midlands had 32.6% of all motor vehicle manufacturing jobs in Great Britain in 2018, up from 29.0% in 2008 (ONS).

Those figures are old now. But the plants that drew the work here are still here, and so are the suppliers around them. Every tier 1 and tier 2 supplier runs its own presses, robots, paint lines and test rigs.

Skills England's 2026 report on advanced manufacturing backs this up. Using the same 2024 survey, it puts the West Midlands among the three regions where advanced manufacturing is more than 3%* of the workforce. Inside the region, it picks out Warwickshire at 4.7%* and Worcestershire at 4.2%* as hotspots (Skills England).

One honest caveat from the same report. The survey mostly counts businesses on VAT and PAYE, so it can miss freelancers and micro firms. The real number of small machine shops is probably higher than the tables show.

The sheds are part of it too

Manufacturing isn't the only work that needs engineers. Transport and storage made up 6.5%* of employee jobs in the West Midlands, against 5.0%* across Great Britain (Nomis).

That means sorters, conveyors, dock levellers, rapid roll doors and charging bays for the truck fleet. A warehouse fitter needs many of the same skills as a factory fitter: motors, sensors, PLCs, pneumatics. So the warehouses on the M6 and M42 are fishing in your pool as well. We cover the sheds in more depth in the Midlands logistics corridor.

The pool is shrinking

This is where the numbers start to bite.

Skills England lists "metal working production and maintenance fitters" among the priority jobs for advanced manufacturing. Of those priority jobs, 29%* are in critical demand and 71%* are in critical or elevated demand (Skills England).

The same report expects an estimated 101,000* workers to leave those priority jobs between 2025 and 2035, and they will need replacing. That comes on top of growth. Most of these jobs also face demand from other growing sectors, which the report says makes it harder to attract and keep people.

So more sites, the same engineers, and more of them retiring. We look at why in why maintenance engineers are so hard to find right now, and at the age profile in the ageing maintenance team.

What the numbers mean at 2am

Here's our view. In a region this busy, you can't wait until the line stops to find an engineer. By then, the good ones are already on someone else's site.

Think back to the press line. Each hour it's down costs you lost output, idle operators, overtime to catch up and maybe a missed delivery. Work out that number once, on a quiet day. Our guide to what an hour of downtime really costs walks through it. Then compare it with the cost of having someone lined up. Most managers who do the sum stop asking whether they can afford cover.

The other mistake is asking for "an engineer". The region's work is mixed. A fitter who's great on a conveyor may never have touched a servo press or a robot cell. When you ring, say what the kit is, what the fault looks like and what tickets they need. The right engineer for one job can be the wrong one for the next.

What to do on Monday

1. List your five most critical machines and the skills each one needs to fix: mechanical, electrical, controls or hydraulics.
2. Work out your cost per hour of downtime for the worst of them.
3. Find two outside engineers in your area who can cover those skills, and get them inducted before you need them.
4. Check the age of your own team and pencil in who might retire in the next five years.

* Employee job counts and shares (ONS Business Register and Employment Survey 2024, via Nomis), the advanced manufacturing shares, the demand figures and the 101,000 replacement estimate correct as of 30 August 2026. Check Nomis labour market profiles and the Skills England sector assessment for the latest.