What it means for people and the business
All of the articles in this series has touched on people in some way. Just like the automotive industry, the shipyards and the Navy are about to learn what a career looks like for someone who keeps a ship going without being on it.
In the first article of this series I described a compartment in a ship under refit, stripped back to the bare steel, where an apprentice had begun their career journey learning how to upgrade and maintain it ready for the next period of operations. The four articles since have begun to acknowledge that, whilst the compartment is still there, the ship may not have anyone on it day-to-day.
The hull that floats and moves is being separated from the capability that fights, the maintainer will no longer deploy with the ship, the data has become what everyone wants to 'own', and the question of who keeps the vessel going has turned into a question about contracts.
What is left to explore is what this might mean for the apprentice, for the sailor, and for the businesses that employ them.
I joined Devonport as an engineering apprentice in 1995, where I was taught a trade. The widespread introduction of desktop computing power was the major innovation at the start of my journey (I remember a single Windows 3.1 desktop being available in the middle of the floor-plate, rather than on every desk). Nearly three decades on, I found myself talking to an apprentice about how innovation might shape their career. We could imagine the first ten years of it with some confidence, but beyond that was much more difficult. Whilst some of the underlying skills will still be important, where, when and how those skills translate is less clear. The ship or boat that the apprentice will support may have nobody on it, the fault they will diagnose will arrive as data, and the question of whether they may fix it at all will have been settled in a contract that sets a different demand.
The underlying skills will also need to evolve to deliver software-defined support, enabled by data from across the enterprise and drawing more on software and network skills. The specialisations will change too - perhaps no longer being skilled across the whole lifecycle of a system, but providing fractional support for specific parts of it, enabled by AI for diagnostics and technical advice, and no longer able to ask the women and men who called the platform home for the previous operation about the installed performance, or the maintenance 'hack' that kept the ship running until the upkeep.
There are significant benefits to be found:
consistent, accurate and accessible data and knowledge;
no more waiting for a technical query to be resolved or a spare to arrive; and,
a greater mass of capability fielded for the same money through faster support delivery
With a reduced reliance on on-board maintainers and operators, operational mass can increasingly be de-latched from the available capacity of the skilled women and men who make up the Naval Service. The employee proposition changes with it, where greater harmony is 'swapped' for the opportunity to 'sail the seven seas and see the world'.
The apprentice's view
The maintainer on a crewed ship has begun to be re-equipped to better operate, maintain, diagnose and repair, after a decade over-reliance on the manufacturer for diagnostics.[1] For an uncrewed vessel, that maintainer will now likely work alongside on a platform that arrives with its own data rather than its own crew. The workforce moves rather than disappears, from the ship to the base,[2] and the direction of travel is a maintainer whose skills look more like a systems engineer's than a technician's, and whose working life is spent in a support facility rather than a machinery space. This is a fundamentally different job, and it isn't clear if anyone has yet written the development or career pathway for it.
The shipbuilding skills taskforce of 2023 could not size the skills gap, but it recorded the fact that matters most: '80 per cent of the 2030 workforce is already in work'.[3] And last year, industry told the Defence Committee that skills shortages have been the top issue in every member survey for ten years, that it costs about £35,000 to train an apprentice against £27,000 recoverable from the levy, and that growing a workforce by 10 per cent takes 'a minimum of two or three years'.[4] The Navy's version of the same development timeline is the National Audit Office's finding that it takes twelve years to grow a Chief Petty Officer, and that weapons engineers were the largest shortfall in Defence.[5] Whatever the Hybrid Navy needs its people to be in 2030, most of them are already employed, and the lead time for the rest is longer than the political timetable.
There is rightly a growing focus on attracting the future workforce into the market. The two largest primes report group-wide figures across every domain they work in, not shipbuilding alone: BAE Systems a record 6,800 early-careers people in training across its UK businesses, Babcock its largest-ever intake of about 1,500 across 2024 and 2025.[6] The shipyard-specific investments are easier to compare, where BAE's £12 million Applied Shipbuilding Academy in Glasgow serves about 4,500 employees and up to 300 apprentices and graduates a year; Babcock's Rosyth plan is for 400 apprentices over four years in a 'digitally led' plant; Navantia UK has recruited 55 new welding and fabrication apprentices in Belfast and Appledore, 153 in total.[7] Balaena, which brought Cammell Laird, A&P Tyne and A&P Falmouth together in June 2026 as a group of over 2,000 people, has committed to a national skills and apprenticeship programme 'in partnership with local colleges and maritime training bodies', though it has not yet published numbers.[8] The Defence Industrial Strategy adds £182 million for the talent pipeline and five technical excellence colleges.[9] In Barrow the people problem has been treated as a 'town-level problem', with £200 million behind the place-based approach as well as the yard.[10] All of this is for jobs that exist, but none of it describes the career of an engineer who maintains a vessel that nobody sails.
A career that does not exist yet
The First Sea Lord has called the Hybrid Navy 'the biggest change of the culture, workforce training and skills for our sailors and marines'.[11] What the public record doesn't yet contain, though, is a branch, a rating or a career path for the women or men who will work on these systems. The skills are arriving before the structure to recognise them. One serving officer, writing anonymously, has argued that 'coding, secure comms, and AI-driven data analysis increasingly outweigh legacy skills' and that 'training and promotion pathways' must 'evolve to recognise and elevate technical expertise', and has described a single Royal Marine remotely piloting an autonomous boat 'through congested harbour waters' from the Navy's experimental ship.[12] The capability is already in the hands of the lower deck, but what has not yet been built is the career that rewards it. The United States Navy has built one, where it created the Robotics Warfare Specialist rating in February 2024, calling it 'a major milestone in our Navy's relentless march to achieve a truly hybrid Fleet', with a dedicated school to follow.[13] That approach seeks to build the career before the fleet, so that the people arrive with it rather than after it.
Rick Haythornthwaite's 2023 review of Armed Forces incentivisation found that 'a take-it-or-leave-it approach will no longer work', that half of service people surveyed felt their Service had not kept its promises, and proposed a 'spectrum of service' in which a career could zig-zag between uniform and industry, with money treated as 'often a hygiene factor' rather than the answer.[14] An engineer who keeps uncrewed vessels going from a naval base is the obvious person for that 'spectrum', with the same skills needed on both sides of the fence, and the data they work with belonging to the Navy wherever they happen to be employed. The MOD's engineer pay supplement trial reports a 53 per cent rise in intention to remain, which is encouraging and is also exactly what a hygiene factor looks like when it is finally supplied.[15] Whether any of this is working for engineers specifically is not something the published statistics can show, as the MOD no longer reports strength or outflow by branch.[16]
Beyond heavy steel
What career a shipyard can offer depends on what business it is becoming. BAE Systems has always balanced shipbuilding with through-life support and is a major equipment manufacturer in its own right; its maritime business made £6.8 billion of sales last year at a return of 6.7 per cent, down from 7.7, because 'several first-in-class programmes' were 'trading at relatively low margins'.[17] Babcock's emergence in shipbuilding was largely built on support, and the Type 31 Class is its first complete warship programme at Rosyth.[18] Its published recovery is a support story: group margin from 5.4 per cent to 8.2 per cent in two years, submarine support revenue up 26 per cent in the latest year, and a chief executive who describes the company as 'a very benign partner to tech SMEs' and says it supports 60 per cent of the surface fleet.[19] Read together, the message is the same, where first-of-class manufacturing erodes the margin, but through-life support is where greater margin can be made. That commercial reality is why a builder values its support and equipment businesses, and why a support business has moved into building. For uncrewed vessels, where platform and support arrive bundled through the manufacturer, whichever direction a yard is growing from, it is growing towards the part of the market where the terms of support have yet to be written.
The automotive industry is an interesting case study, with many parallels and lessons for shipbuilding and sustainment. Ford's chief executive described a car whose software was 'written by 150 different companies' that 'don't talk to each other', in which he had 'to go to Bosch to get permission to change their seat control software', and concluded that Ford had to own the electrical architecture itself.[20] Volkswagen built a software company of 6,000 people, lost two billion euros on it in nine months of 2024, cut 2,000 jobs, lost a chief executive in part over it, and ended by handing core development to a joint venture run by a start-up's software chief.[21] The 'post-mortems' do not say the car makers lacked engineers, but that the manufacturers built a software organisation before they owned the architecture it was supposed to run, and that a hardware company structure couldn't deliver it. The lesson for shipbuilding, or for Defence more widely, is not to hire a thousand software engineers, but to decide consciously what it will own, the data, the interfaces, the support record, and then hire the people to own it.
The board's choices
A traditional prime looking at the vibrancy and emergence of new autonomy businesses within the market has three visible choices. The first is to absorb the emerging scale-ups, with defence mergers and acquisitions described as having 'hit an all-time high in 2025', and one European analysis warning of a 'bear hug' in which start-ups drift into acquisition by the established primes.[22] The second is to partner: Babcock's stated positioning alongside technology SMEs, Anduril's GKN agreement and its list of British suppliers, the Kraken deal.[23] The third is to compete with the neo-primes: BAE's FalconWorks promised 'a more open model than what is traditionally seen', and its chief executive now speaks of autonomy attracting 'significant investment in innovation' and of competitors from outside traditional defence.[22]
There is a fourth choice, and the whole of this blog series has somewhat been an argument for it. The announcements that prompted these articles were not about drones or factories but about a naval capability being separated into a hull that floats and moves and a capability that fights, and it is worth gathering what 'software-defined' would mean if the industry adopted it rather than argued about it.
In design, it means the interfaces are the product; where a hull specified by what it can carry and connect to, and a common standard for the payloads, which the Uncrewed Systems Centre now has the remit to set.
In capability terms, it means the thread that has run underneath the series: that what fights can be updated at the pace of software, swapped as a module, or moved off the hull altogether, and that the speed at which new capability can be adopted and refreshed becomes the measure of the fleet rather than the age of its hulls.
In build, it is not a claim about speed but about information: a baseline configuration for each hull as it leaves the yard, the steel, the paint, the routing and the software, held as data that follows the ship rather than paper taped to a bulkhead.
In support, it means the right maintenance at the right time, planned from what the machinery is doing, with the maintainer re-equipped to diagnose and repair whether on board or alongside, and the data defined by what is essential rather than what is 'interesting'.
In acquisition, it means the contract settles at the outset who may use the data and who may do the work, because that is where lock-in is designed in or designed out; and
in people, it means the career is built before the fleet arrives.
None of that belongs to a neo-prime or a traditional one. It is a way of working any of them could adopt, and the evidence in these articles is that all of them are already moving towards it from different starting points. The new market entrants that go to an established yard for depth support, the support house that has moved into building, the builder and equipment maker that values its support business, the neo-prime assembling a British supply chain. The companies that lead will be the ones that can manage the whole of that system rather than defend one piece of it, and for a business below the top tier that means being the integrator of one layer across many platforms rather than the owner of one platform.
The previous article argued for support built on the customer's data, and I support that, in the sense that the customer must have the right to its data and the people to use it. But that is different from the customer owning the architecture that holds it. The data that runs through all of it will not be best exploited by any one party claiming ownership of the system (the customer included) as everyone with an interest in it: the Navy that operates the vessel, the maintainer who keeps it going, the manufacturer whose equipment generates it, has a different need from it. The value sits in the partnerships that let each of them use it.
I said at the start that this series was not about who wins, but about how the whole industry adopts an approach so that capability reaches the front line faster and the industrial base that delivers it is sustainable. If there is a practical conclusion, it is that the sequence of events matters more than the technology. A career structure that is designed before the fleet arrives, what each party 'owns' across the support enterprise. With contract boundaries and terms settled at award, and what a shipyard for the future is becoming decided before it hires the people and skills for it. For the apprentice in that compartment, the trade being learned is still needed, but the vessel is changing shape around it. There is a great deal of opportunity in the uncertainty that surrounds off this.
