Engineering underpins many of the sectors, industries and technologies which operate within our economy. Engineers are incredibly diverse in their work, from designing devices that makes music tactile for people with hearing impairments, to new sustainable energy solutions. They can make small improvements to someone’s daily life or tackle the biggest challenges of our time.

Engineering is what has driven industrial revolutions and inspired inventions – the first car, the first space rocket, the first mobile phone and more recently, the first mRNA vaccine. History has shown that science and innovation is transformed into technology and solutions through engineering.

However, the economic contribution and impact of engineering is still relatively unrecognised in economic strategy and policy, rarely prioritised or centre stage.

A large part of this is down to the poor availability and structure of data which measures economic output. When it comes to analysis, there is a fair understanding of the major sectors in the economy, such as manufacturing, but less so of cross-cutting disciplines. Engineering traverses the economy, meaning (like its partners in STEM - Science, Technology and Maths) it is particularly complex and difficult to measure using traditional analysis. These challenges exist in national level analysis but intensify when the objective is to understand engineering in local economies.

Important work to define and describe engineering has already been done by the Royal Academy of Engineering and its partners Engineering UK and the Engineering Council. Our team has been working with the Academy on a wider piece of work titled Engineering, Economy & Place, which builds on these studies and improves the understanding of engineering in places across the UK. The full report is due to published in early 2023, but to coincide with National Engineering Day and celebrate the achievements of the profession, early findings of this research are being released today.

With the established definitions of engineering and data from the Office of National Statistics still at its core, the research reaffirms engineering as high value and highly productive, driving the sectors which are delivering innovation-based growth across the UK.

It reveals that engineering delivers up to an estimated £646bn to the UK’s economy annually, employing more than 8.1 million people (a quarter of the UK workforce) and has a footprint of almost 730k businesses (13% of the business base). For the first time, we can understand the profile of engineering in our local economy; from burgeoning clusters of research and development, to engineering economies with long established, large businesses which anchor local employment.

Engineering represents 1 in 4 jobs and 1 in 10 businesses. This is a significant a role in our economy that innovation, education & skills, and enterprise policy at national and local level must consider.

This is Engineering – a campaign from the Royal Academy of Engineering designed to rebrand engineering for young people – reinforces the importance of engineers in society. This research will help to voice engineering's value still further. The task ahead is to ensure the message does not drift into the wind.