Record sponsorship for 2025 Leeds Manufacturing Festival

A record number of sponsors are backing this year’s Leeds Manufacturing Festival, as employers in the region look to innovative ways to address the skills gap in the sector and inspire a new generation of talent to consider careers in the sector.

The festival, aimed at connecting young people with engineering and manufacturing employers, launched this month at a sell-out event and will see school and college students gain insights and develop relationships with manufacturing businesses at a series of face-to-face events across Leeds.

A line up of headline sponsors announced for the initiative, which is now in its eighth year, have been announced as specialist manufacturing and engineering recruiter E3 Recruitment; Enginuity, the UK charity aimed at closing the skills gap in engineering and manufacturing and Leeds Beckett University, as well as the city council and Made Smarter Yorkshire and Humber, a business support programme that helps manufacturers adopt digital technologies and skills.

A host of big name and smaller manufacturers are also backing this year’s festival. Textile firm AW Hainsworth, cremation and incineration equipment manufacturer Facultatieve Technologies, high-performance cutting tools engineer MA Ford Europe and control panel specialist Technical Control Solutions have joined packaging company Greyhound Box, Kirkstall Precision Engineering, Leeds Welding Company, glass reinforced plastics manufacturer MPM, process control systems business Saftronics, juke box manufacturer Sound Lesure in sponsoring Leeds Manufacturing Festival 2025.

Matthew Booth, associate director at E3 Recruitment, said: “As recruiters in this industry we see the urgent need for employers to be able to hire people across a broad range of skills for the diverse roles that are involved in a manufacturing business, from engineers to welders, to the marketing team.

“We’ve seen over the years how incredibly effective the festival is in inspiring young people by showing them just what manufacturing is really like, and the excellent careers on offer in the sector for all sorts of people with different skill sets. Needless to say, it’s an invaluable initiative and E3 Recruitment is really proud to be involved with the festival again this year.”

Lindsay Bradburn, HR officer at Facultatieve Technologies, which is supporting the festival for the first time this year, said: “As an employer it can be difficult to show young people that you are there, and that you have all these great career opportunities on offer.

“Even though we are based very close to UTC Leeds, it wasn’t until we took part in the careers showcase at the Leeds Manufacturing Festival launch event that we were suddenly on the radar of all the students who were attending and we had huge amounts of interest from them. Hopefully we can go on to develop some of those relationships and that is the real value of the festival in forging lasting bonds and interest between manufacturing employers and young people.”

Richard Eaglen, managing director of Leeds Welding Company, said that the firm’s long-term involvement with the initiative, since its launch in 2018, had generated resoundingly positive results for his business. “Working with the festival, and meeting the young people taking part, has turbo-charged our apprenticeship programme. We have gone from five or six students applying to be apprentices to this year receiving more than 60 applications and that simply would not have happened without the festival.”

Leeds Manufacturing Festival has a full programme of events running until September. They include company visits and insight days, careers panels, a Women in Engineering and Manufacturing event and June’s Leeds Manufacturing Festival Awards, which celebrate some of the outstanding younger people working in the industry. Find out more about the festival here.

For the third year Leeds Manufacturing Festival is supporting the work of the Howarth Foundation, which helps people who are homeless or in unstable accommodation to find work or training.