A holiday home manufacturer running factory tours for sixth-formers reads like a feel-good community story. It is one.

It is also a recruitment move. And a sign of the problem bearing down on the sector.

Willerby brought students from Wyke Sixth Form College into its Hull plant as part of the regional Celebration of Manufacturing. They walked the line from steel chassis to finished lodge, then split into teams to design a trade-show stand or build a recruitment campaign aimed at people their own age.

The company did not do it for the warm glow, though. It did it because the factory floor is getting harder to staff, and the people who will fill it are still in school.

What Willerby Actually Did

Two staff led the tours: Product Design Manager Rob Pryde and Process Engineer Trevor Baxter. Students saw the full build, from chassis and insulation through cladding, windows, kitchens and bathrooms, to the final quality check.

They then worked in teams on one of two tasks, a trade-show product display or a campaign to pull young people into careers at Willerby, and presented the results to the businesses taking part.

Willerby says it is one of Hull’s largest employers, in a city manufacturing sector it puts at 21,000 jobs. The wider event is run by The Work-wise Foundation, an employer-led charity that links young people to industry.

The company also marks its 80th year in 2026, having started in 1946 making touring caravans before it moved to holiday homes and lodges.

Where the Next Squeeze Comes From

The timing is the tell.

981,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training between April and June 2026. That is 13.0% of that age group, and up on the year before, according to the ONS.

Nearly a million young people with no work and no training.

Now set that against the other half of the problem. UK manufacturing is short of skilled hands and its workforce is ageing, with a large share of experienced staff due to retire this decade. Make UK and the trade press have been flagging the gap for two years.

The sector has an answer for its existing people. The NCC Training Academy passed its tenth year keeping current staff skilled. But training the people you already have only works if new ones keep coming through the door.

So the constraint on a holiday home business is not buyer demand. It is the people to build the product. Two large pools, young people out of work and factories short of staff, sit either side of a gap that nobody has joined up.

That is what Willerby is doing. It is treating recruitment the way a good firm treats marketing: build awareness early, with the audience that has not decided yet.

Trevor Baxter, who led one of the tours, noticed it himself. Students were surprised, he said, by the scale of the site and “just how many different roles there are here.”

School leavers do not reject factory careers. Most have no idea they exist.

What It Means for Holiday Home Makers and Park Operators

This is not a touring-dealer story. It lands on holiday home and lodge manufacturers, and on the park operators who staff maintenance, grounds and hospitality teams every season.

The skills squeeze hits all of them. Here is what you can do about it this month.

  • Call the STEM or careers lead at your nearest sixth form or college. Offer a tour. Willerby’s visit came through one such contact at Wyke. It costs you an afternoon.
  • Read your own careers page as a 17-year-old would. Does it show the range of jobs and what the work is actually like, or does it just list vacancies when you are desperate?
  • Brief your line managers to talk about the breadth of roles, not one job. The thing that moved these students was seeing how many different paths a single site holds.
  • If you run apprenticeships, make them visible on the site and on social, not buried. If you don’t, price one. It is cheaper than a recruitment agency and it builds loyalty.

The firms that win the next decade’s labour are the ones introducing themselves to it now, while their competitors are still posting jobs and hoping.

Where This Leaves Everyone Else

A holiday home is only as good as the people who build it. That supply is tightening, and the easy fix of hiring experienced staff from a rival runs out fast when everyone is doing it.

Willerby has worked out that the pipeline starts in a classroom, not on a job board.

The question for the rest of the sector is simple. When a college asks who will show their students a real factory, will your name be on the list?