Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
Wednesday saw the launch of the Close Brothers Scholarship programme at the AMRC Training Centre in Yorkshire.
The MTA played an important role in bringing Close Brothers and the AMRC, both of which are associate members, together and in designing the scheme which aims to help SMEs by subsidising apprentices’ wages.
MTA CEO James Selka visited the Southam headquarters of the Engineering Technology Group to formally open their impressive Permanent Trade Show.
As well as opening the facility Mr. Selka also produced a foreword to a White Paper report by Tata Technologies on Addressing the Skills Gap. We’d encourage all of our members to read this document, as it has some very interesting research about how we can reassess the basic principles of our employee’s time management and how that can impact on productivity.
If you have not already secured your place within the MTA Golf Team, then act fast! The MTA's Annual Inter-Association Golf Day takes place on 15th July 2015 at the Leicestershire Golf Club. All abilities are welcome and will enjoy the course. This is about networking with our good friends in other manufacturing focused associations along with some friendly competition.
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) will be hosting a workshop aimed at identifying suitable training pathways for employees of manufacturing businesses in the Leeds region on 16th June. More details on the event can be found in the story below.
The productivity puzzle is an issue for four fifths of England’s smaller manufacturers. Research out this week highlighted that small and medium sized manufacturers (SMEs) in England are still striving to find the answer to the ‘productivity puzzle’. Full details can be found within the brief.
The manufacturing output data published this week was generally positive, especially for the key sectors for manufacturing technology suppliers; Aerospace output is growing strongly and there are modest but healthy expansions in both the Automotive and Metal Products industries - the puzzle remains the Machinery industry, although this is affected by some strange data in January of this year (and in January 2013) and by excluding the effect of these two months, the resulting picture does not look as bad as at first sight. The latest GDP estimates published by Eurostat confirm the view that the European economies are improving slowly, with only Greece and Finland still in recession and France returning to growth.
And finally, just a quick final reminder that the May edition of the MTA Business Survey is still open for members’ participation; the on-line form is at http://www.mta.org.uk/mta-business-survey-may15.
Thank you for reading and we’ll be back with more news next Friday, until then have a fantastic weekend from everyone at the MTA.