Scotland holds 85 career records for mechanical engineering capability, but only 5 of them are already in Peterhead.

Your live vacancy sits in a Scottish pool that is real but geographically awkward: the majority of the talent is concentrated in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, not on your doorstep. Understanding exactly where those 85 people are, how long they stay put, and who currently employs them is what determines whether you fill this role in weeks or months.

What your market actually looks like

The most instructive non-obvious fact in this data is the employer concentration: across the entire 85-record Scottish pool, only six distinct employers account for named holdings of this capability, and Score Group itself already carries six of those records — matching Leonardo's four and outpacing every other named employer. That means you are not fishing in an open lake; you are competing with a small, identifiable set of businesses for a skill set that does not spread evenly across the market. Mott MacDonald, Altrad Babcock, NOV and SDJ Design Engineering Ltd each hold only two records apiece, which tells you the realistic competitive set for a direct approach is narrow and the individuals within it are not hard to map.

When these people move

The median time a mechanical engineer in this pool spends in a role before moving is 1.6 years, derived from 378 completed roles — that is a short tenure by most engineering standards and it means a significant proportion of the pool is approaching or already past their natural inflection point. Overlay that against the 21 people who moved into their current role within the last 18 months and you can see the split clearly: roughly a quarter of the pool is too recently settled to be a straightforward target right now, but the remaining three-quarters either hit or have already exceeded that 1.6-year median. The practical implication is that the window for approaching the settled majority is open today, and waiting another quarter could push more of them into the recently-moved bracket where receptiveness drops sharply.

Who holds this capability

Score Group leads the named employer table at six records, which is notable given Peterhead's distance from the central-belt hiring centres. Leonardo sits at four, reflecting its Highlands and defence-adjacent pipeline. Mott MacDonald and Altrad Babcock at two each are consultancy and industrial services businesses whose mechanical engineers carry transferable process and plant experience directly relevant to your sector. NOV at two is particularly pertinent given the shared energy-services context, and SDJ Design Engineering at two rounds out a shortlist of six employers whose mechanical engineering headcount you could approach with a credible, sector-coherent proposition. None of the six is a household-name tech giant able to compete on brand alone; the conversation with their people is winnable on project substance, location stability and career trajectory.

Where people actually go

The observed inter-employer moves in this pool are limited in number but tell a coherent story: the Jacobs-to-Mott MacDonald and Tetra Engineering-to-Jacobs transitions confirm that the consultancy and engineering-services corridor is the main highway. People move within that world — from specialist contractors into mid-tier consultancies and back — rather than jumping laterally into pure industrial employers. The Intra Drive Limited / Intradrive / PINND sequence suggests a subset of the pool has moved through smaller, specialist drive-systems businesses, which points to niche mechanical competence that is unlikely to surface through generalist advertising. For Score Group, the actionable read is that your most realistic recruits have consultancy or energy-services backgrounds, and the route to them is not a job board — it is a direct approach into that consultancy corridor before another firm in the same corridor makes the move first.

Where the pool is

Of the 85 records, Glasgow accounts for 19, Aberdeen for 18, Edinburgh for 12, and Peterhead — your location — for only 5. A further 3 sit in the Greater Aberdeen Area, 4 in Dundee, and the remainder are distributed across Scotland. Aberdeen and its hinterland together give you 21 records within a commutable or short-relocation radius, which is a workable base. Glasgow and Edinburgh at 31 combined represent the largest concentration, but that is a 2.5-to-3-hour commute each way from Peterhead, making relocation a realistic conversation rather than a daily travel assumption. The 1,611 active companies registered in your postcode district means you are not operating in an isolated market — there is employer competition locally — but the thin Peterhead headcount in the pool confirms that local passive supply alone will not fill this role and that an Aberdeen-radius or relocation pitch is the necessary approach.

What the market pays

The advertised-salary index for mechanical engineer in Scotland stands at £46,196 as of July 2026. That is the most recent dated benchmark in the data and it reflects what competitors are putting in front of candidates at the point of advertising, not what they necessarily settle at. No published pay-progression series for this specific role exists in the data beyond that single index point, so a band built around £46,196 as a mid-point is the most grounded public anchor available. Candidates with the consultancy or energy-services background identified in the movement data — particularly those carrying senior or principal titles in the pool sample — will benchmark themselves above that figure and any approach that does not account for that expectation will stall early.

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 into the Aberdeen and Greater Aberdeen Area segment of the pool — 21 records within viable commuting distance — is the logical first pass, targeting individuals who have been in their current role beyond the 1.6-year median and who sit with the named employers in the competitive set: NOV, Altrad Babcock, Mott MacDonald and SDJ Design Engineering in particular. The Glasgow and Edinburgh cohort requires a relocation conversation from the outset, which narrows it to the records showing a pattern of multi-employer mobility — the pool sample includes individuals with up to nine roles on record, which is a reliable indicator of geographic and organisational flexibility. We would sequence the approach in that order: Aberdeen-radius first, high-mobility central-belt second, and we would frame every conversation around project substance and the stability of a Peterhead-based role rather than competing on salary headline alone.