Scotland holds 86 career records matching your Maintenance Engineer brief, but only 5 of those people are already based in Kilmarnock.

Brodie Engineering is competing for a thin local slice of a pool that is heavily concentrated in Aberdeen and Glasgow, cities where the oil-and-gas and rail sectors have first claim on the same skills. The numbers below tell you exactly where the tension sits and how much runway you have before the window tightens further.

What your market actually looks like

The non-obvious pressure point is not the headline pool size — 86 records sounds workable — it is how tightly that capability is held by a small cluster of specialist employers. ScotRail accounts for 4 of those positions, SLB and Oceaneering each hold 3, and Altrad Sparrows holds a further 3. That means roughly 15 % of the active pool is sitting inside just five businesses, all of which offer sector premiums, shift patterns, or offshore rotation that a land-based engineering role will struggle to match on like-for-like terms. The implication is that the genuinely movable cohort is smaller than the raw number suggests, and your pitch needs to be tailored to what those employers cannot offer — stability, geography, or a defined career track — rather than competing on the same axes.

When these people move

Across 413 completed roles in this pool, the median tenure before a move is 2.3 years. That figure alone suggests a market that turns over reasonably often. Layer on top of it the fact that 13 people moved into their current role within the last 18 months, and the picture shifts: a meaningful share of the pool has just settled somewhere new and is statistically unlikely to move again in the near term. The practical read is that you are not working with a static queue — fresh movers from late 2023 through mid-2025 are largely off the table for now — but anyone who moved before roughly the start of 2024 is entering the window where a well-framed approach lands rather than irritates.

Who holds this capability

The 86 records are spread across identifiable employers with Aberdeen taking 11 of the pool, Glasgow 9, and Kilmarnock itself only 5. The named employers holding this capability — ScotRail, SLB, Oceaneering, Altrad Sparrows, LifeScan, and AJT Engineering Ltd — span rail, oil-field services, life sciences, and contract engineering. That breadth matters because it means there is no single dominant feeder: you are not simply recruiting against one competitor type but against a spread of sectors, each with its own retention levers. LifeScan and AJT Engineering together account for 4 records, which flags that manufacturing and contract-engineering backgrounds are already represented in the pool — directly relevant to a SIC 33170 (repair of transport equipment) operation like Brodie.

Where people actually go

The observed inter-employer moves give you a realistic sourcing map. Two recorded moves run from Michelin to Scott & Fyfe Ltd, which tells you that people with large-scale manufacturing maintenance experience do cross into smaller industrial businesses — that transition is not theoretical. Two further moves run from Aker Solutions to Oceaneering, confirming an oil-and-gas internal circuit that is harder for you to interrupt mid-cycle but not closed. The Royal Navy to ScotRail move, recorded once, illustrates a defence-to-rail pathway that has been walked before; given ScotRail's presence in the pool, people who have already made that kind of sector transition once are demonstrably open to doing it again. Taken together, the pattern points toward manufacturing-sector leavers and defence-trained engineers as your most realistic recruitment population, rather than the offshore cohort who tend to recirculate within their own sector.

Where the pool is

Aberdeen holds the largest single cluster at 11 people, Glasgow sits second at 9, and Kilmarnock — your location — has only 5. Edinburgh adds 4, Greater Glasgow Area a further 4, and Inverness 3. For a Kilmarnock employer, Glasgow and Greater Glasgow together represent 13 reachable records within plausible daily commute range; the A77 and rail links make that feasible without relocation. Aberdeen is the largest single source but requires a genuine relocation conversation, and the oil-and-gas premium those candidates are used to makes the financial ask material. Inverness represents 3 records but sits roughly 160 miles north, so relocation support would be a prerequisite. The honest arithmetic is that your natural commutable catchment — Kilmarnock plus Greater Glasgow — covers around 18 of the 86 records, under 22 % of the pool, which means either a competitive local offer or a credible relocation package is necessary to access the rest.

What the market pays

The advertised-salary index for Maintenance Engineer in the UK registers £45,478 as of July 2026. That is the most current published data point available and represents what competing employers are putting on the market right now, not what they are paying legacy staff. If your advertised rate sits below that figure, you are starting the conversation at a disadvantage against any candidate who has done basic market research. If it sits at or above it, that is worth stating explicitly in your outreach rather than leaving candidates to assume otherwise. No separate published pay series exists in the data for SIC 33170 transport-equipment repair specifically in Kilmarnock, so no further local adjustment figure can be cited.

A sample, anonymised

Real career records. Names and profile links are withheld here; they are released with the full read.

The approach

A direct approach to the movable cohort is the right method here — posting and waiting hands the timing to candidates rather than to you, and in a pool of 86 where at least 13 have moved in the last 18 months, the genuinely receptive group is specific enough to warrant individual outreach. We would prioritise the records showing manufacturing or defence backgrounds — consistent with the Michelin-to-Scott-and-Fyfe and Royal Navy-to-ScotRail movement patterns — and within those, focus first on people whose current tenure puts them past the 2.3-year median, since those individuals are statistically at the point where the right conversation prompts a serious look. The 12 anonymised sample records in the pool include candidates in North Ayrshire, Cumbernauld, Glasgow, and Inverness, with role histories ranging from 1 to 10 positions — that spread of seniority and mobility means the approach can be calibrated by profile rather than sent as a broadcast. We can map the full 86 against those filters and bring you a prioritised long-list before any candidate is contacted.