The UK is running out of skilled people to make its medicines, and this project aims to fix that by building a national training network. The problem is a critical skills shortage in medicines manufacturing—areas like quality control, process development, and regulatory work are understaffed. Meanwhile, manufacturing technology is shifting toward digital tools, automation, and data analysis, so training must catch up. The UK’s life sciences sector could create roughly 133,000 jobs by 2030, but without enough trained workers, that growth will stall. The RESILIENCE Centre of Excellence will coordinate training across a network of academic providers. It will create shared, scalable teaching materials, use virtual and mixed reality for consistent digital training, and run accelerator programmes for students at all career entry points—from T-levels to apprenticeships to graduates. Within two years, the centre aims to be self-sustaining, with over 150 affiliate members accessing standardised core materials. If this succeeds, the UK’s medicines manufacturing workforce will grow consistently across the country, keeping the supply chain for new drugs—from vaccines to gene therapies—running smoothly. The impact is on an infrastructure people rarely think about: the quiet system that ensures medicines are actually made, not just discovered.
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The project will establish the RESILIENCE Centre of Excellence for UK Medicines Manufacturing Skills by bringing together the leading regional training providers. There is an urgent need for training and outreach to support the UK life sciences workforce and there is also an opportunity, as a major report states that the sector has the potential to create approximately 133,000 jobs by 2030, through replacement and growth \[ScienceIndustryPartnership\]. The UK has a long and proud history of medicines discovery and manufacturing. From penicillin to monoclonal antibodies to revolutionary cell and gene therapies, the UK has always shown the world great leadership. During the Covid-19 global pandemic, one of the first vaccines to emerge was from Oxford University scientists. The UK now faces a critical skills shortage in key areas of medicines manufacturing, particularly manufacturing, analytics/quality, process development and regulatory. Added to this, medicines manufacturing technology is rapidly evolving, bringing an increased need for skills in digital, computational/automation, and data/statistics, so training needs to evolve to ensure the workforce can adopt them. We will adopt a co-ordinated and scalable approach to skills development for the UK medicines manufacturing community. The Centre of Excellence will comprise a network of academic delivery partners with an unrivalled track record for delivering training for the medicines manufacturing community. We will draw on our existing infrastructure for rapid operationalisation, building onto them new approaches such as: * Co-created, co-branded core materials for training and outreach that are readily scalable across the UK. * Digital training approaches including cutting edge virtual reality and mixed reality to enable standardisation and consistency across our network. * Accelerator programmes for T-level students, undergraduate placement students, graduates and CPD trainees, and apprenticeship cohort activities, supporting all career entry points. Within two years the RESILIENCE Centre of Excellence will be self-sustaining and include over 150 affiliate member education providers and industry users, who have access to core training materials that ensure a minimum quality standard is met, enabling consistency in workforce pipeline growth across the whole UK. The UK will then continue to be a world leader in the creation and manufacturing of new medicines for decades to come.
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