Europe needs to take urgent action on skills and education to encourage young people to become engineers or risk losing out to India and China as a manufacturing power, according to the continent's leading industrialists.
Chief executives and chairmen from 50 of Europe's biggest companies from Royal Dutch Shell and Siemens to Nokia and Nestlé – list the growing skills shortage as one of their biggest long-term concerns if the continent wants to boost its competitiveness, according to their chairman, Leif Johansson.
Mr Johansson, the head of the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT) and also chief executive of truckmaker Volvo, told the Financial Times that public debate was focusing on the wrong issue.