May – July 2025
The ‘UK population projections to 2047 and their implications for the workforce planning‘ whitepaper provides a summary of the latest national and sub-national population projections and considers the implications for the energy and utilities sector’s future workforce planning.UK population projections to 2047 and their implications for the workforce planning.
Read the paper here.
UK Employer Skills Survey – latest data release (ESS 2024)
DfE and Skills England have recently published the latest Employer Skills Survey 2024 (ESS 2024) data. This has been gathered via a large-scale survey of 22,712 employers across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, providing labour market information on the skills challenges they face.
The release provides data on:
- Recruitment and skill-shortage vacancies
- Skills gaps
- Training and workforce development
- Investment in training
Some UK headlines include:
- Around one in six (17%) employers in the UK had a vacancy at the time of the survey, representing a decrease from 2022 (23%) and 2017 (20%).
- Overall, 6% of employers had a skill-shortage vacancy; this was a decrease from 10% in 2022, though the same proportion as in 2017.
- Just over a quarter (27%) of all vacancies in 2024 were skill-shortage vacancies, down from over a third (36%) in 2022, but higher than in 2017 (22%).
- 12% of employers had at least 1 member of staff who was not fully proficient (i.e. a skills gap), lower than in 2022 (15%), but similar to 2017 (13%).
- Overall, 4.0% of the workforce had a skills gap, down from 5.7% in 2022 and 4.4% in 2017.
- Just under three-fifths (59%) of employers had provided training for their staff in the last 12 months, a decrease from 60% in 2022 and from 66% in 2017.
- The total UK training expenditure in 2024 was £53.0bn, down from £59.0bn in 2022 (in 2024 prices) and a 18.5% decrease since 2011. This equated to a spend of £1,700 per employee, down from £1,960 in 2022 and a 29.5% decrease since 2011.
We will be conducting our own analysis of the data and reporting back to members in the Autumn.
