SiteYou've seen the advert. Maybe you wrote it. "Multi-skilled maintenance engineer. Mechanical and electrical. PLCs, drives, hydraulics, pneumatics, robots. 18th Edition. Nights."
Three months on, it's still open. The people who apply are mostly fitters with a bit of electrical, or sparkies who can change a bearing. Every so often someone turns up who can genuinely do the lot. They want a lot more than the advert says.
Asking for everything gets you nobody. Asking for the right mix gets you a team that can fix your machines.
What multi-skilled really means
We'd split it like this. A good multi-skilled engineer is strong in one trade, safe in a second, and can read the third.
Strong means they can fault-find it on their own at 2am and get it right most of the time. Safe means they can do the routine jobs in it without making things worse: isolate and prove dead, swap a sensor like for like, reset an overload and find out why it tripped. Read means they can follow a drawing or a ladder, spot what's wrong, and know when to stop and ring someone.
That's a realistic engineer. The fitter who did an electrical course at night school. The electrician who grew up rebuilding engines. You'll find these people. They're good value, and they'll tell you straight where their line is.
What you won't often find is someone who's strong in all three. Those engineers exist, but there aren't many. They tend to be senior, and the market knows what they're worth.
Why the line matters
The law cares about the line between "safe" and "strong". Electrical work is where it bites.
Under the Electricity at Work Regulations, nobody should do work that needs technical knowledge or experience to prevent danger unless they have it, or are properly supervised (regulation 16). HSE's guidance on what that means includes "adequate experience of the electrical work being carried out" (HSR25, paragraph 239).
So a fitter who's safe to change a prox isn't automatically competent to fault-find a drive. Both are electrical work. They're different jobs. Writing "multi-skilled" on the rota doesn't change that. If anything goes wrong, someone will ask who decided that person was competent for that task. That someone will be asking you.
HSE's guidance says supervisors' duties should be stated clearly, and suggests putting them in writing as the risk goes up (HSR25, paragraph 241). We'd go further. Write down where each engineer's line is. Not a vague "electrical: basic". A list of jobs they can and can't do alone.
Training someone up is a duty too
Most multi-skilled engineers aren't hired. They're made. A fitter who's keen picks up electrical work over a few years, with courses and a good sparky to learn from.
If you're doing that, the law has a say. The Management Regulations require health and safety training when people face "new or increased risks", including when they're given "a change of responsibilities" (regulation 13). PUWER also needs anyone using work equipment to have "adequate training" for it, including the risks and the precautions (regulation 9). Maintenance counts as use.
So the day your fitter starts on electrical jobs, they need the training to go with it. A course alone won't do. Get them working alongside an electrician on your own panels. Our post on going from mechanical fitter to multi-skilled covers the routes engineers take, and which tickets help. If you're wondering whether the 18th Edition is one of them, we've looked at whether it's worth it for a maintenance engineer.
The trap: one person who does it all
Here's the problem with finally finding that rare engineer who can do everything. Everyone leans on them.
They take every drive fault, every PLC change, every hydraulic leak that nobody else wants to touch. The rest of the team quietly stops learning. Then they go on holiday, or get poached, and you find out how much of your site was living in one head.
That's the real cost of a single great engineer. When they're off, a fault that took them twenty minutes takes the night shift four hours. Or it waits until morning. Put your own downtime cost per hour on those hours and it adds up fast.
Spread the skills instead. Two engineers who each cover two trades well are worth more than one who covers three. Map it out first. A skills matrix shows you in ten minutes where you've got one person between you and a stopped line.
Write the advert you can fill
Pick the main trade first. Look at your breakdown log for the last six months. Is it mostly electrical and sensors, or mostly bearings, belts and gearboxes? Hire for that. Then name the second trade as "safe and willing to learn". Leave the third off, or call it a bonus.
Be honest about the pay as well. If you want someone strong in two trades, you're paying for two trades. A fitter's rate with a sparky's list of duties is why so many of these adverts sit open. We've written more on why engineer vacancies sit open for months.
And for the jobs that sit outside everyone's line, plan for them. A drive fault on nights with nobody competent on shift is a known risk. You can see it coming. Decide now who you'll call, so the shift isn't working it out at 3am.
Our view
Stop asking for the engineer who does everything. Ask for a strong trade and a safe second one, train them up properly, and write down where each person's line sits. Then plan for the gaps rather than hoping someone will stretch.
What to do on Monday
- Go through your breakdown log and count faults by trade. Hire your next engineer for the biggest pile.
- For each engineer, write a list of electrical jobs they can do alone, and those they can't.
- Find the jobs only one person can do, and pick someone to learn each one.
- Rewrite your advert with one main trade, one second trade, and a rate that matches both.
* Paragraph numbers refer to HSR25, third edition (2015). Correct as of 13 September 2026. Check HSE's electricity pages for the latest.