Advanced materials are only as powerful as the skills behind them
Ceramic Matrix Composites are often held up as the answer to some of engineering’s hardest problems. Higher operating temperatures. Lower weight. Greater efficiency. Genuine durability in environments that destroy conventional materials.
In aerospace, defence and energy, they make performance levels possible that simply cannot be reached with anything else.
So why are they still confined to a handful of applications?
Cost. Supply chain. Both real. Neither the limiting factor.
The actual constraint is more fundamental - we don’t have the workforce capability to use CMCs at scale. And until that changes, the materials gap is the wrong thing to be worrying about.
We are solving the wrong problem
One assumption shapes almost every conversation about advanced materials - that adoption follows innovation. That once a material exists, industry will find a way to use it.
That’s not how it works in practice.
Materials don’t generate value on their own. They require engineers who can design with them, technicians who can manufacture them, and organisations with the process knowledge to integrate them into production. When that capability doesn’t exist, the material stays in the laboratory - no matter how good it is.
Across UK manufacturing, we’re already seeing what happens when that gap is allowed to widen. Skills shortages have reached more than half a million vacancies. Over 60 per cent of manufacturers report difficulty filling skilled roles.
The consequences show up in constrained capacity, delayed programmes - and the quiet decision by many organisations simply not to attempt new materials at all. That last one rarely makes it into the reports, but it’s probably the most damaging.
Make UK’s most recent assessment describes a “perfect storm” - skills shortages, an ageing workforce, and a talent pipeline that has been declining for years. The High Value Manufacturing Catapult has made the connection explicit - the UK’s ability to compete in advanced manufacturing depends directly on having a workforce that can apply the technologies, not just understand them.
For CMCs specifically, that constraint is amplified. The gap between what these materials can do and what industry currently has the skills to do with them is significant - and growing.
CMCs are not an extension of what we already know
One reason the gap persists is that CMCs are routinely treated as a natural progression from polymer composites.They are not.
The shift is structural. The materials behave differently. The manufacturing processes are different. Cure becomes sintering. Process windows tighten considerably. The failure modes and design assumptions that hold for polymer systems don’t transfer.
Engineers who have spent careers working with polymer composites encounter CMCs and find their instincts don’t apply. That isn’t a criticism - it’s an honest description of what happens when the underlying physics changes. CMC components operating at 1000°C behave in ways that require fundamentally different thinking about design, process selection, and risk.
The consequence is that even experienced engineers lack confidence when it comes to making real decisions about CMC parts - which material grade for a given environment, what the trade-off is between performance and manufacturability, where the process tolerances sit and what happens when they’re breached.
These are not things you learn from a datasheet or a classroom.
Capability is built through experience, not exposure
This is where the development model needs to change.
The way skills are typically built in advanced manufacturing was designed for industries where technology evolves slowly - where processes are stable for long periods and a qualification developed over several years still reflects current practice when it’s eventually delivered.
Advanced manufacturing is not one of those industries.
Technologies move from research to industrial relevance in years, not decades. Training systems that take three to five years to produce a new qualification can’t keep pace. The result is a persistent lag - materials innovation moves but workforce capability struggles to follow.
New hires with relevant qualifications routinely arrive needing months of additional development before they’re productive. That isn’t a failure of individuals - it’s a structural problem in how the training system is built.
For CMCs, the lag is even more pronounced. There are fewer training pathways, fewer experienced practitioners to learn from, and limited opportunity to build capability in a controlled environment where making mistakes is part of the process.
What’s needed isn’t more awareness. Most engineers who encounter CMCs already understand what they can do. What they need is the chance to actually work with them - to develop the practical judgement that only comes from direct engagement with the material and the process.
What applied training actually looks like
At NCC, we’ve been working directly with this problem.
The short duration training we’ve developed for CMCs is designed specifically for working professionals who don’t have months available and can’t afford to learn through trial and error on live programmes. Small groups, working directly with CMC materials and manufacturing processes.
The emphasis throughout is on decision-making - how to approach part design, how to evaluate process options, how to assess risk in practice.
The aim isn’t to produce CMC specialists in two days. It’s to give engineers and technicians a solid enough foundation to engage with these materials with confidence - to ask the right questions, recognise where their existing knowledge applies and where it doesn’t, and make informed decisions rather than defaulting to avoidance.
That kind of applied learning is still rare across the sector, despite consistent demand. That gap is itself a signal. Investment has gone into materials. Not enough has gone into people.
This is a strategic question, not just a training question
What happens at an individual training level and what happens at a national level aren’t separate questions. They’re the same question at different scales.
The UK has clear ambitions around advanced manufacturing, sovereign capability, and leadership in aerospace, defence and clean energy. CMCs sit directly within those ambitions - enabling technologies central to next-generation propulsion, energy generation, and structural performance.
But the ability to design and manufacture with these materials can’t be imported as readily as the materials themselves. If the skills and accumulated process knowledge sit elsewhere, so does the real value - the capacity to iterate, innovate, and build on early applications.
That creates dependency, not just on supply chains, but on knowledge.
Government analysis has already identified shortages of composite engineers and manufacturing specialists as constraining industry growth. The HVMC has been direct about it - investment in materials without corresponding investment in capability produces gaps, not competitive advantage.
The UK has spent years developing better materials. The next phase has to be about developing the capability to use them. That’s the shift that determines whether innovation translates into real impact.
For organisations thinking about this now
The question for engineering leaders is no longer whether CMCs will become more important. That’s settled. The question is how quickly teams can develop the practical capability to work with them - before the skills gap makes those decisions for them.
Capability is built through experience, not exposure. The materials are ready. The question is whether the people who need to work with them are.
For those looking to build that foundation - NCC’s Introduction to Ceramic Matrix Composites is a practical starting point - hands-on, focused, and designed around the decisions engineers actually face.