Interview: Karen Boswell, managing director of Hitachi Rail Europe
17.03.2017
Hitachi Rail Europe’s managing director is focused on reaping the benefits of a diverse workforce in the north east. Stuart Nathan reports
The north east of the UK was particularly hard hit by the changes to the industrial landscape of the late 1970s and 1980s. Traditional industries, such as steel, mining and shipbuilding, saw wide-scale facility closures and redundancies, and regional unemployment hit a very high level.
Karen Boswell, managing director of Hitachi Rail Europe
The situation in the region has now improved quite dramatically, with the automotive sector being a particular bright point: Nissan’s plant near Sunderland is the UK’s largest car factory and the most productive in Europe. The rail industry, whose roots are in the north east, is now a major employer in the region once again with the opening in 2015 of Hitachi Rail Europe’s manufacturing hub at Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, which late last year saw the unveiling of the first Intercity train to be built in the plant. Costing over £80m, the Newton Aycliffe factory will employ some 900 people directly by spring of this year, and create many more jobs in the local supply chain as the majority of components for its trains are sourced from within 50 miles of the facility.
The north east of the UK was particularly hard hit by the changes to the industrial landscape of the late 1970s and 1980s. Traditional industries, such as steel, mining and shipbuilding, saw wide-scale facility closures and redundancies, and regional unemployment hit a very high level.
The situation in the region has now improved quite dramatically, with the automotive sector being a particular bright point: Nissan’s plant near Sunderland is the UK’s largest car factory and the most productive in Europe. The rail industry, whose roots are in the north east, is now a major employer in the region once again with the opening in 2015 of Hitachi Rail Europe’s manufacturing hub at Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, which late last year saw the unveiling of the first Intercity train to be built in the plant. Costing over £80m, the Newton Aycliffe factory will employ some 900 people directly by spring of this year, and create many more jobs in the local supply chain as the majority of components for its trains are sourced from within 50 miles of the facility.
Finding the right skills
Despite the industrial hardships that have hit the area, Hitachi Rail Europe managing director Karen Boswell said that the company had little difficulty in finding people with the right skills to staff the plant. “While the challenges the north east has had from industrial perspective are well known, we have been very fortunate to find the skills that we need to come into Newton Aycliffe,” she told The Engineer. “We had well over 17,000 applications, and we found some super people from quite a range of different businesses. We not only had a very wide pool to draw from, we really were able to focus on recruiting people with the right attitude and approach, as well as making sure they had the skill level we needed.” As the company expands the number of shifts operating at Newton Aycliffe, this recruitment is set to continue.
However, Boswell added, as with the rest of the engineering sector, Hitachi Rail Europe faces a challenge in recruitment for the future, and the company intends to play a major role in ensuring that its pipeline of new recruits remains strong. “It really is a challenge,” she said. “There’s 87,000 graduate-level engineers a year needed between now and 2020, and the education system is only producing 46,000 of those.”