Report: Restructuring of UK aerospace
A new report has been published as part of the 'UK aerospace restructuring: jobs, skills and high-performance work' project.
A new report ‘Restructuring of UK Aerospace’ by Professor Jonathan Winterton, Professor Chris Forde, Dr Ian Greenwood, Nafisat Olabisi and Dr Andrew Shires has been published as part of the 'UK aerospace restructuring: jobs, skills and high-performance work' project.
The report summarises a scoping exercise of restructuring in the UK aerospace sector involving a literature review and a series of interviews with industry stakeholders and experts, conducted in 2021 and 2022. The report has been drafted in preparation for a major programme of research into the restructuring of the UK aerospace sector.
The aim of the report is to identify and discuss the factors shaping restructuring in aerospace, and to look at the likely consequences for the industry, primarily business strategy and employment relations. The report concludes by setting out a framework for understanding restructuring in the aerospace sector, which emerges from the literature review and interviews undertaken.
This framework, the authors argue, can be used to analyse restructuring, and to help forecast job and skill needs in the aerospace sector. It deploys the heuristic restructuring model used in a range of earlier studies of other sectors (including garment manufacture and coal) and sets out key themes and issues that need to be analysed in future research to develop a comprehensive sector change model of UK aerospace.
The team is grateful for the participation of industry experts and stakeholders, many of whom have agreed to join a panel to guide future research work, and to ensure its grounding in the current realities of work, employment and restructuring in the industry. The authors remain responsible for errors and omissions in this work in progress.
