We talk constantly about Britain's skills shortage. We need more engineers, more people in energy, more people in nuclear and renewables and the answer nearly always seems to be the same: get more young people into STEM.

Fine. We absolutely need them.

But what about the thousands of highly skilled people we have already trained who are sitting outside the workforce because they took a career break, were made redundant or simply couldn't find a way back in?

Natalie Desty, founder of STEM Returners, tells me this week why she's leading a crusade to do just that, bring back people who have fallen out of favour, lost jobs or simply had to walk away due to family life. And how they have so much to offer to plug the gap!

Natalie spent years in engineering recruitment watching perfectly capable people disappear from consideration simply because their CV wasn't neat enough.

“I saw these really capable people who wouldn't get seen through standard channels,” she told me. “And we had an advanced skills gap, particularly within defence engineering. I went to a Women's Engineering Society conference about the year before I started STEM Returners and the speaker said there are 75,000 people who have left STEM who would love to return.”

Women are a huge part of that missing workforce. Natalie says 46% of the engineering returners she works with are women compared with around 12% of the wider industry, with caring responsibilities the biggest reason people step away.

“There's a retention issue for sure at that mid-career female bit,” she said. “A lot of these people would have been retained if they were in a more supportive, flexible environment. It's almost like they felt they had to leave because they were letting the company down.”

And the frustrating thing is that a short break can become a very long one. “Often women will think I'm going to step away for a bit. I'm going to step away for six months, a year without realising that actually that's going to turn into five years because it's going to take that long to get back in.”

STEM Returners tries to provide that bridge through supported placements where employers can see what somebody can actually do rather than dismissing them because of a gap on a CV. Natalie says they have now returned around 700 people to work and 96% get a job at the end.

But I think the bigger point goes beyond helping individuals back into work. Returner programmes can also become a way of moving skills between industries as the energy transition accelerates.

“A returners programme, it's almost like it automatically doubles up as a transfer of learning programme,” Natalie explained. “They're a mechanical design engineer but they're pivoting their skills from a different industry.”

That could mean taking decades of experience from oil and gas, automotive, defence or rail and using it in renewables, nuclear and other growing sectors.

Natalie believes we need to stop treating this workforce as an afterthought.

“For me, I just think we need a fourth pathway. We've got apprentices, we've got graduates, we have about reskilling… We have absolutely no pathway for the experienced people who have left and all of that capability that we've lost, that we've already invested in as a country.”

And perhaps most importantly, bringing experienced people back helps the next generation too. “We cannot fill this gap through early career routes alone,” she said. “Bring those mid-career, experienced professionals back at the same time who can mentor, who can help and develop the young people coming through as well.”

That really does feel like a no-brainer. Listen to my full conversation with Natalie Desty on the Net Hero Podcast, download the episode wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe.

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