The future is physics

In delivering a step change to its economy, Northern Ireland must change how it thinks about physics and provide full recognition of its place and role in the education system, skills development, job creation, productivity and research and development.

The Institute of Physics (IOP) is the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland. It seeks to raise public awareness and understanding of physics, inspire people to develop their knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of physics and support the development of a diverse and inclusive physics community. As a charity, it has a mission to ensure that physics delivers on its exceptional potential to benefit society.

As a society we face an unprecedented array of challenges. Globally, we need to address a changing climate and a growing population, to decarbonise economies, improve healthcare and ensure water, food and energy supplies. Domestically, we need to develop the next generation of industries to create jobs and improve productivity to safeguard citizens’ futures.

Physics has a vital role to play in tackling these issues and helping make the UK and Ireland fit for a new industrial era of science, technology and engineering, an era the IOP wants to see the UK and Ireland transformed into science superpowers.

So where does Northern Ireland stand on the cusp of this new era?

There is much opportunity but for it to be fully grasped Northern Ireland’s physics-based businesses need supported in skills and research and development (R&D).

The IOP’s Workforce Skills Survey for the UK and Ireland found a common picture. With physics skills underpinning productive industries in both, strengthening provision of physics skills is central to ambitions to improve economic growth, prosperity and living standards at national and local levels.

Beyond a new approach to physics in our education system the actions needed now are:

• ensuring availability of a variety of physics education and training pathways, as well as complementary transferable and digital skills development, all informed by close engagement between educators, employers, and researchers and innovators;
• incentivising employers to invest in employees’ upskilling and reskilling; and
• ensuring interventions aimed at strengthening provision of physics skills move beyond the level of ‘STEM skills’, given the distinct labour market demand for physics knowledge.

Despite preconceptions, the demand for physics spans all skills levels. High-skill-level roles are seeing the fastest growth, with the number of jobs for physical scientists, for example, growing by 40 per cent between 2010 and 2020, more than half (53 per cent) of physics-demanding jobs do not require a degree.

Already there is significant unmet demand for physics skills, with a substantial number of physics-demanding roles at any one time (nearly 9,000 high-duration vacancies in mid-2021, having quickly recovered to pre-pandemic levels) seeming to persist in being hard to fill.

There is strong, sustained growth in demand for physics skills, particularly outside of the scientific sector, with a significant proportion of hard-to-fill vacancies being for digital, and business and finance roles, reflecting their importance, but likely to exacerbate existing skills shortages in the coming years.

While Physics Based Industries (PBIs) come under many different names it includes advanced manufacturing, sciences and technology services, medical equipment servicing, energy sector and telecoms. Whatever the enterprises are called PBIs are a major and key contributor to Northern Ireland and have the potential to do much more.

The IOP’s research into the impact of PBIs, shows in Northern Ireland they account for nearly 50,000 full-time employees. They contribute £3.5 billion to Northern Ireland’s Gross Value Added (GVA) the same contribution as the retail sector and represents 7.3 per cent of Northern Ireland’s GDP. The annual turnover is worth £10 billion making it larger than the construction sector. With productivity a major challenge for the Northern Ireland and broader UK economy, the physics sector is a trailblazer with labour productivity of £71,966 per worker. As a sector it provides high value jobs with average employee compensation of £34,791.

In the past decade, while Northern Ireland PBIs achieved the highest GVA growth (47 per cent) of all UK regions, 21 per cent employment growth (13 per cent UK average) and in Northern Ireland their productivity growth of 21.3 per cent was almost five times the Northern Ireland performance of 4.5 per cent. With 92 per cent of the 5,285 physics-based companies being micro-sized (less than 10 employees) the opportunities for more growth, better jobs and higher productivity are there to be taken.

R&D, and its commercialisation, is the next piece to becoming science superpowers but both the UK (1.8 per cent) and Ireland (1.4 per cent) fall well below the OECD average of spending 2.4 per cent of GDP and behind key competitors such as Germany who spend 3 per cent or more. In 2021, the IOP commissioned the report Paradigm Shift analysing the R&D work of UK and Irish PBIs. It highlighted the need for more, longer-term investment sustained throughout the R&D chain with government incentives vital to achieve this.

Key performance indicators included the scale of investment, track record of securing government resources and relationships between industry and research institutions. The Northern Ireland PBIs performed well in industry/research relationships and securing government resources (both at UK and Northern Ireland levels) but amongst lower on scale of investment than elsewhere in the UK. The challenge is how to make this ‘small but perfectly formed’ research community can be upscaled. The survey showed Northern Ireland PBIs involved in R&D planned to increase their commitment and saw it as central to their future development.

The Department for Economy’s new 10x vision for the next decade makes clear the need for:

“…a step change in how we think about our economy”.

Part of that step change must be how Northern Ireland thinks about physics and provides full recognition of its place and role in the education system, skills development, job creation, productivity and research and development.

For further information visit us at iop.org