A tungsten mine in Devon has been sitting quiet for years. Now someone has to switch the lights back on.
Tungsten West got the green light this week on a proposed £71m backing package from the government's National Wealth Fund, aimed at restarting the Hemerdon mine near Plymouth. Sixty years of on-and-off history at that site. A fresh push now to bring it back into production by early 2027.
The government's own announcement puts the figure at around 350 direct jobs once the site reaches full scale.
Add the usual ripple of contractors, suppliers and local spend that follows any reopened industrial site. And the real number climbs higher still.
Healey, the chancellor, framed the whole thing around defence and nuclear supply chains and cutting reliance on imported critical minerals. Fair enough. That's the headline version.
The bit that doesn't make the press release
Nobody restarts a mine with a press release.
You restart it with people, and not just any people. Someone who has actually run a production site before, who knows what a ramp-up to full output looks like when half the workforce is new and the other half hasn't touched heavy processing kit in years. That experience doesn't show up just because a press release says the funding has landed.
A plant manager, a production manager, an operations lead who can take a site from cold start to steady output without six months of expensive stumbling. Those are the people this whole story actually hinges on. They're not sitting around waiting for the phone to ring either. Chances are they're already running something, somewhere, usually well.
Why does reopening a site create a hiring problem before it creates an operational one?
Because the machinery can be ordered and installed to a schedule. Leadership can't be ordered at all.
A production manager who has actually restarted a mothballed facility, managed a phased ramp-up and built a shift pattern from nothing is a rare combination of experience. There's no supplier catalogue for that kind of person. You either headhunt it, promote into it and hope, or go without and pay for the gap later in scrapped output and blown timelines.
Make UK's most recent skills shortage report puts a number on the scale of this. 186,000 unfilled vacancies across UK manufacturing, up 12% on 2024, with 42% of those now classed as real skills-shortage roles rather than simple churn, up from 29% back in 2017.
The same report puts the annual output cost of those gaps at roughly £6bn. None of that is abstract if you're the one trying to fill a plant manager seat on a live restart timeline.
What does this actually mean for a business trying to hire right now?
It means the search takes longer than most boards expect. And it means the candidates worth having are rarely job hunting in any traditional sense.
A strong operations manager or engineering manager with restart or scale-up experience on their CV tends to move through a personal network or a specialist search, not a job board. Advertise a plant manager role cold and you'll get plenty of applicants. But getting the right one is a different exercise altogether.
We see this pattern constantly on projects that look nothing like a Devon tungsten mine on paper but share the exact same shape underneath.
A new production line. An acquired site that needs its own leadership rather than borrowed cover from head office. Or a facility scaling up faster than its management bench can keep pace with.
The names change every time. But the gap in the org chart never does.
Notice periods make this worse, not better
The part that catches people out is timing.
Engineering managers and production leaders worth hiring are, by definition, already doing well somewhere else. Which means a three-month notice period is normal, sometimes longer at director level. Add a competitive counter-offer from their current employer. And a process that looked like ten weeks on a project plan can stretch well past twenty.
None of that is a reason to panic though. It's a reason to start earlier than instinct suggests. And it's a reason to be honest about what a senior hire like this actually costs in time as well as salary. A lot of manufacturing boards budget for the salary and forget to budget for the wait.
What good looks like in a restart hire
Technical competence gets someone shortlisted. On its own, it rarely gets them hired for a role like this.
What actually separates a strong plant manager from an average one in a restart scenario is whether they've built a team from a standing start before. Whether they can read a half-installed production line and know what's likely to break first. And whether they can hold a workforce together through the inevitable early wobbles without losing credibility on the shop floor.
That's a leadership assessment more than a technical one.
It's exactly where a lot of internal recruitment processes fall down, because the interview panel is built to test technical depth and ends up rubber-stamping confidence instead of actually checking it. A good production manager can talk convincingly about a P&ID diagram and still fold the first time a supervisor pushes back on a shift change.
Where we've seen this go right
Manufacturing clients who handle this well tend to do one thing consistently. They start the search for senior operational leadership before the capital project is fully signed off, not after. It feels premature. But it isn't.
A plant manager or production manager brought in early can help shape the ramp-up plan itself, rather than inheriting someone else's assumptions about how fast a site can realistically scale.
If your business has a restart, an expansion or a new facility on the horizon, and the leadership bench underneath it is thinner than you'd like, that conversation is worth having well before the building work finishes. We specialise in plant manager recruitment and production leadership roles across UK manufacturing, permanent and contract. The earlier that conversation happens, the fewer expensive surprises turn up six months in.
Job seekers watching the manufacturing market for their next move can see live engineering vacancies on our jobs page, though most of what's covered here is really an employer's problem to solve rather than a candidate's.
You can read more about how we work with manufacturing and engineering employers on our engineering recruitment page. Our salary guides are worth a look too, if you're trying to work out whether your offer for a plant or production manager stacks up right now.
