'Twas ever thus ......
Nigh on 40 years back when I started my first Engineering Degree, it was being vigorously promoted in all the broadsheets and "meeja" that any kind of Engineering and especially Mechanical Engineering & Trades qualifications were just irrelevant relics of the past and Accountancy & Services were the way of the future.
It all conveniently forgot that the economy still needs a minimum number of people to grease the wheels of industry, the Accountants' BMW's still needed serviced and people who are working today have this annoying habit of getting old, retiring and eventually dying, making it difficult to encourage them to continue working.
And gosh, darn it, wouldn't you know that the poorer countries who were still training hordes of engineers that the Broadsheets, Politicians etc. all confidently predicted would be fighting each other with 5h1tty sticks just for the chance to come to the UK largely decided that the while the grass maybe was greener here they were overall better off not migrating here to be patronised and paid buttons.They might still be being paid buttons on a global payscale, but they didn't have to move too far away from home, get used to a different climate & friends & family stayed in the same time zone.
There was a small filip in the numbers of Engineers being publicly acknowledged as necessary about a decade or more ago, but we've been relying on having other countries do our Engineering for us for too long whilst our own population has aged and died. You can rely on "High Value Engineering Centres", i.e. design offices stacked with inexperienced but cheap graduates overseas for paper engineering for so long, but once you lose your practically-skilled core of people your then start to pay through the nose and be vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
Sow the wond,reap the whirlwind etc., etc. As someone who assesses Engineers for their professional competence on behalf of one of the Institutes, I can honestly say that there are still good Engineers coming through, but there are a whole lot more of them who are not, and never will be UK-based.
Much is being made of going "Net-Zero", but I don't hear about who is going to design, install, maintain, decommission and recycle all of the wind turbines, hydro schemes etc. and their associated transmission and connection systems in the near, medium or long term. We need to get back to the old Yorkshire saying of where there's muck there's brass. If you need to do something you HAVE to get your hands dirty & it has to be made financially, societally and individually attractive, otherise people just won't come into the field.