The UK is facing a significant shortage of skilled welders, threatening to undermine efficiency and productivity across several critical sectors, including food manufacturing.
The average age of a welder in the UK is 55 years old. By next year, nearly half of the sector is anticipated to retire - leaving a shortfall of 35,000 workers.
So how do we plug this gap - and quickly?
Is automation the answer?
Automation in a variety of forms has been moving up the agenda for some time, offering small and medium-sized businesses an opportunity to keep up with skills shortages and retiring workforces.
Retirement no longer only creates vacancies, it risks the loss of in-depth knowledge; leaving many manufacturers, especially SMEs, exposed to an expertise gap they can’t plug quick enough.
Collaborative automation can help address this challenge by enabling businesses to capture and standardise proven welding techniques, ensuring important knowledge is retained and consistently applied, long after individual employees have left the workforce.
While technology can help manufacturers with filling immediate gaps, it also creates opportunities to reshape how manufacturing work is performed or distributed and who can perform it, including using collaborative robots, better-known as cobots.
How can cobots help?
Traditional industrial welding robots aren’t new. Car manufacturers have used them on assembly lines for decades, running the repetitive welds on similar parts, thousands of times over. They’re powerful but have traditionally had their limitations and brought greater inflexibility and higher costs.
Cobots offer a different proposition. Designed to work alongside people rather than replacing them, they’re smaller, more affordable and importantly, quicker to programme and redeploy.
A welder can guide a cobot’s arm through a weld path manually, or set it up through straightforward software, imparting their knowledge of the craft without needing a background in robotics.
That flexibility is extremely important for SMEs that switch between different batch sizes and varied jobs all day.
The factory floor can then become a space where existing welders can supervise multiple cobots handling the less safe and repetitive jobs while freeing up skilled hands for the high-precision work and training only a human can do, allowing the industry to keep up with demand as fewer new welders come through the door.
In fact, Universal Robots’ State of Industrial Automation 2025 survey found that 91% of respondents believe cobots could help reduce global labour shortages by at least 10%.
But closing that gap doesn’t mean fewer people on the shop floor. When businesses adopt automation, they tend to still need people to run and supervise it, often creating new opportunities in higher-skilled, higher-value roles.
This is backed up by research by Copenhagen Business School, which confirmed that Danish companies that adopt industrial robots tend to grow rather than shrink. They become larger, more productive, and often employ more people.
Automation doesn’t just replace a task, it frees up capacity for a business to take on work it couldn’t handle before. That extra capacity still needs someone’s expertise to run and supervise these tools.
That ‘someone’ is where the opportunity lies for the next generation of welders. Instead of standing at a booth eight hours a day, exposed to potential injury and monotony, you could be upskilling, instead of deskilling.
To future-proof your workforce the investment in training and development of that new skill set is essential.
Listening to your welding predecessors still matters, but combining that with a robotics background automatically modernises the trade and attracts a new cohort of workers.
Applying it to food manufacturing
Automation applications have been used across industries in different ways, with many helping to make sure dangerous, dirty or highly repetitive tasks are no longer ones humans should be required to do.
In food manufacturing, welding use cases are less common; but when welding is required, it takes a highly niche skill set that must adhere to strict hygiene standards.
Orbital welding for hygienic piping, for example, is one of the most automation-friendly applications in the entire welding world because the process is repetitive, precision-critical, and the tolerance for human error is extremely low.
Welders in this specific area are even harder to come by, and the stakes of getting it wrong are higher. That combination of scarcity and low tolerance for error is where automation has a clear role to play, offering the consistency that food-safe production lines demand.
And crucially, removing people from these tasks doesn’t mean removing people from a business. In fact, it tends to be the opposite. Those that have automated the dirty, dangerous or repetitive work often find they can take on more contracts, run more lines, or increase output, which in turn creates new roles rather than erasing old ones.
This makes quite a compelling case for automation, unlocking a new kind of growth that has traditionally felt out of reach, especially for smaller manufacturers.
A chance for SMEs too
There are a lot of misconceptions around advanced automation and robot integration being extremely expensive and exclusively for large corporations with huge budgets and expansive factories. But the rise of cobots is dismantling that misconception.
In many SME cases where welding remains a bottleneck and businesses are expected to go head-to-head in the same hiring pools as large organisations, cobots offer a way to keep up with pace and demand.
For example, Centerline Brackets, a company of only 20 employees, saw the arrival of a cobot as a way to dramatically cut production time and address labour shortages while ensuring consistent weld quality.
Crucially though, the introduction of the cobot did not cause layoffs; it improved worker wellbeing by cutting overtime and the demands of wearing a welding mask for 12 hours a day.
The message for SMEs is simple: competitiveness through automation is no longer a large-enterprise advantage – it’s very much within reach.
Closing the gap, not the trade
Welding has a much bigger people problem than it does an automation one. One that’s been building for years and is now arriving rapidly, as a generation of welders head toward retirement faster than the next cohort comes through the door.
Cobots won’t solve this on their own, but they can change what’s possible while the industry catches up. Giving SMEs a way to compete for talent and contracts they couldn’t win before, freeing experienced welders from repetitive high-risk tasks, and opening a route into a trade for people who might never have considered it before.
The businesses that get ahead of the shortage won’t be the ones waiting for more welders to arrive. They’ll be the ones making the most of the welders they already have, embracing the shift as a skills revolution and creating a technologically advanced trade that’s worth joining in the first place.
About the author
Mark Gray started his career as an electrical engineer working on automation and packaging lines before moving into sales. His first role was working with machine vision from Cognex before joining Universal Robots (part of Teradyne Robotics) ten years ago, in that time he has built up the UK team and opened the first UK office in Sheffield which offers training and proof of concept trials.
