Where to study for Britain’s 50,000 new defence jobs

Britain will need an estimated 50,000 additional defence workers by 2034/35, and the government has named the colleges and cities where training for those roles is being funded.

Defence Technical Excellence Colleges have been announced in Blackpool, Plymouth, Lincoln, Rotherham and Yeovil, the Department for Business and Trade confirmed in its Industrial Strategy Year One report.

Lincoln College has been given Defence Technical Excellence College status, and a new Defence Universities Alliance will strengthen regional training ecosystems.

Up to 2,500 student places are being created in defence-focused university and college courses from Newcastle to Exeter, part of an over £1 billion skills investment spanning defence, construction, engineering and digital.

The colleges sit within a wider network of 29 Technical Excellence Colleges expected to serve more than 100,000 students, and £47 million has gone to mayors to drive adult engineering skills for those retraining rather than starting out.

The jobs are clustering around five £50 million Defence Growth Deals in Plymouth, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and South Yorkshire, backed by £250 million in total.

In Scotland, the £10 billion Norway frigate deal is set to support more than 2,000 jobs in Glasgow’s shipyards, with a further 2,000 across the UK supply chain, more than 100 Scottish businesses benefiting, and a work pipeline running into the late 2030s.

Scotland’s deal includes £5 million each for innovation centres on the Clyde and in Rosyth. Wales’s deal focuses on autonomous systems, while Northern Ireland’s supports SMEs developing dual-use defence and civilian technology.

The Swedish Gripen fighter jet deal for Ukraine will see over 30% of each aircraft built in the UK, supporting more than 5,000 jobs in England and Scotland and sustaining a pipeline of high-value aerospace employment. Europe’s largest drone testing centre, the Uncrewed Systems Centre, has also opened at the DroneTEX facility in Swindon.

2025 was the biggest year for UK defence exports on record, including the £8 billion typhoon agreement with Türkiye, and UK Export Finance has launched a £50 billion Defence Export Fund, the largest expansion of its financial capacity in its 100-year history.

For students choosing where to study, the report points to shipbuilding on the Clyde, aerospace across England and Scotland, autonomous systems in Wales, and engineering courses in the five named college towns as the clearest routes into the sector.

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