Insights
The UK does not have a single skills gap. It has several, and they are far deeper in some sectors than others. Using the government Employer Skills Survey, the most authoritative source on the subject, we pulled together where the shortage actually bites. The headline is that a quarter of all vacancies are now hard to fill because employers cannot find people with the right skills, and in construction it is nearly half.
By Christopher Fagan
A skill shortage vacancy is one an employer cannot fill because applicants lack the skills, qualifications or experience needed. The chart below shows the share of vacancies that fall into this category, by sector. The higher the bar, the harder that sector is finding it to hire the people it needs.
It helps to separate two things that often get merged. The first is the hiring problem, the skill shortage vacancy, where the people simply are not available to recruit. The second is the proficiency problem, the skills gap, where people are in post but not yet fully able to do the job. The survey found around 1.26 million workers in the second category, roughly 4 per cent of the workforce. Hotels and restaurants, wholesale and retail, and the primary and utilities sector carried the highest proportions.
Skills shortages are usually treated as a recruitment issue, but they are also a delivery risk. When a business cannot hire the engineers, analysts or operators it needs, its change programmes slow down, its transformations stall, and its plans quietly become undeliverable. In sectors such as construction, manufacturing and utilities, where the shortage is deepest, ambitious programmes are being set against a workforce that is already stretched. That gap between plan and capacity is where projects fail.
The businesses that cope best treat skills as something to design for, not assume. They map the capabilities a programme actually needs before committing to a timeline, build in time to grow or bring in scarce skills, and lean on partners for the specialist capacity they cannot justify hiring permanently. In a market this tight, being honest about capacity is the difference between a plan that lands and one that overruns.
PEF helps clients close the gap between ambition and capacity, through our people and change practice and by providing specialist delivery capability where it is scarce. Talk to us if a skills shortage is putting your plans at risk.
Using the Employer Skills Survey, around a quarter of all vacancies are hard to fill because employers cannot find people with the right skills, and separately more than a million workers are assessed by their employers as not fully proficient in their roles.
Construction is the hardest hit, where close to half of vacancies are hard to fill for skills reasons, followed by education, manufacturing, and the primary and utilities sector.
A skills shortage is not only a recruitment issue, it is a delivery risk. When a business cannot hire the people it needs, its change programmes slow down and its plans quietly become undeliverable, which is why capacity has to be planned for rather than assumed.
If any of this is live for you right now, the senior people who wrote it are the people you would work with.