Redundant engineers are failing to grab job opportunities here and abroad, says one specialist recruitment firm.
Birkenhead-based firm Scantec says too many engineers, architects, designers and surveyors made redundant by the recession, are underselling themselves on the jobs market and fail to realise how they can transfer their skills.

“The key message is that there are jobs out there for engineers across the UK and the world,” said Scantec director Peter Bates. “We need to explode this gloom and doom. It is not the case that there are ‘no jobs’'.

He added: 'We speak to engineers who are working at Tesco stacking shelves and they come to us thinking they’re on the scrapheap. Too often people have the blinkers on and do not see how skilled they are, and how useful those skills are to other sectors.”

Workers can tap into opportunities to work in oil and gas, water, construction and the nuclear industry

Finding specialist recruiters helps and Scanlec alone is placing more engineers overseas than ever before in its 19 years of trading.

He said: “There is a big demand for skilled engineers in the oil and gas sector in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Nigeria, Singapore and Russia.” “In the past it was mainly expats we were placing who were comfortable with prospect of living overseas. But increasingly we’re placing more people who’ve never lived abroad before because there are lots of jobs and the money is good.”

In the UK, the company says it is placing more workers into the resurgent nuclear industry.

Nuclear is tipped to provide a huge number of jobs in the future with Gordon Brown revealing that up to 9,000 jobs could be created by the programme to build four new power stations and another 1,000 once the plants were up and running.

'Critically the new generation of plants need to be built by 2025 so there will be a considerable amount of work spread over a long period,” added Bates.