Scotland holds only 75 career records carrying Marine Engineer capability, so your hiring margin is thin from the outset.

Macleod Engineering is advertising a Marine Engineer into a postcode district — IV27 — that sits alongside 430 active companies competing for a narrow slice of Scottish technical labour. The pool is real but small, and the detail below tells you exactly where it lives, how long it stays put, and where it has been moving.

What your market actually looks like

The non-obvious point is concentration at the top of the employer list: CalMac Ferries Limited alone accounts for 6 of the 75 career records — 8% of the entire Scottish pool sits with a single operator. CPBS Marine Services and Inverlussa Marine Services each hold 2 records, as do Marine Scotland Compliance, Sentinel Marine Ltd, and Loch Duart Salmon. That pattern tells you the pool is not spread evenly across dozens of employers; it clusters around a handful of ferry, compliance, and aquaculture-adjacent operators, which means your realistic recruiting universe is narrower than the headline figure of 75 suggests.

When these people move

The median time a person in this pool spends in a role before moving is 1.9 years, calculated across 378 completed roles — that is a relatively short tenure and signals a workforce accustomed to changing berths. Set against that, 13 of the 75 have moved into their current role within the last 18 months, meaning roughly 1 in 6 is still inside the honeymoon window where a counter-approach is least likely to land. The practical read is this: the majority of the pool is statistically past the point where loyalty to a current employer is at its strongest, and the 1.9-year median gives you a narrow but genuine window before the next natural move happens without you in the conversation.

Who holds this capability

CalMac Ferries Limited is the dominant holder with 6 records, followed by CPBS Marines Services Edinburgh Scotland (2), Inverlussa Marine Services (2), Marine Scotland Compliance (2), Sentinel Marine Ltd (2), and Loch Duart Salmon (2). The presence of Loch Duart Salmon — a salmon farming operator — alongside ferry and compliance bodies confirms that Marine Engineer capability in Scotland has migrated into aquaculture support as well as traditional vessel operations. That broadens the sourcing frame: you are not restricted to approaching ferry engineers, and candidates already working in northwest Highland aquaculture infrastructure may have shorter relocation distances to Scourie than those based in Central Belt ferry operations.

Where people actually go

The observed moves on record are instructive: two people have moved from Stena Line to CalMac Ferries Limited, one from Border Force to CalMac, and one from Maersk Line to Border Force — a clear gravity pull from deep-sea and government maritime work toward Scottish inshore and ferry operators. Two further moves are recorded internally within CPBS Marine Services to its Edinburgh entity. The pattern tells you that engineers do move down from international deep-sea careers into Scottish coastal roles, and that Border Force and government marine compliance act as a stepping-stone rather than an end destination. Practically, that means Stena Line, Maersk, and Border Force alumni are demonstrably open to this kind of transition and are worth treating as a sourcing tier in their own right, not just the obvious ferry operators.

Where the pool is

Of the 75 records, the largest concentrations sit in Aberdeen (6), United Kingdom broadly coded (6), Glasgow (5), and — usefully — Scourie itself (5). Edinburgh contributes 3 and Greater Glasgow Area a further 3. The 5 records already located in Scourie are your clearest near-term candidates; they carry no relocation requirement. The Glasgow and Edinburgh contingent — 11 records combined — represents the realistic relocation tier: Glasgow to Scourie is approximately 270 miles and Edinburgh slightly further, so any offer must either carry a relocation package or be positioned as a live-in or rotational arrangement to convert that interest into movement. The Aberdeen cluster of 6 may already be oriented toward offshore rather than inshore work, but the documented drift from deep-sea into inshore roles suggests they are not out of scope.

What the market pays

No published pay series covers this specific occupation in the DATA available to us. There is no dated benchmark figure we can cite. What we can tell you is that going into the market without a defensible rate is a material risk given that the pool is only 75 strong nationally and that 13 have moved in the last 18 months — those individuals have live, current market data on what they were offered to move. We would recommend anchoring your rate to direct intelligence gathered during approach rather than relying on any publicly available survey, and we can bring that intelligence back to you before you finalise the package.

A sample, anonymised

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

The approach

Direct approach is the only method that reaches the employed majority of a 75-person pool — job board posting alone will only surface the fraction actively looking, which the tenure data suggests is a minority at any given moment. We would prioritise the 5 Scourie-located records first given zero relocation friction, then work through the pool sample systematically: GRW-527-11 carries 9 roles on record and has been in post since May 2022 — well past the 1.9-year median — making them statistically overdue a move; GRW-527-03 brings 15 roles of breadth as a Marine Mechanic Operations Manager; and GRW-527-04 and GRW-527-06 both hold Chief Engineer tenure that may suit a senior or lead brief. We would contact each individually, present your role on its own terms, and return to you with a shortlist built on responses rather than speculation.