“Workforce pressures” has become a familiar term across the UK employment market.
It can describe everything from rising employment costs and stretched teams to recruitment freezes, retention challenges, employee burnout and increasing workloads.
But behind many of these pressures sits a more structural challenge: the UK skills gap.
Despite a labour market in which candidate availability has increased and overall vacancies have fallen considerably from their post-pandemic peak, employers are still struggling to find people with the precise technical knowledge, professional experience and transferable skills required for critical roles.
The result is an increasingly complicated recruitment market. There may be more candidates available, but that does not necessarily mean there are more suitable candidates available.
For employers across London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Cardiffand the wider UK, understanding that distinction is becoming increasingly important to workforce planning.
The UK Labour Market Has More Candidates – But Skills Shortages Remain
At first glance, the recruitment market should be becoming easier for employers.
Office for National Statistics data estimated approximately 707,000 UK vacancies between May and July 2026, representing a further quarterly decline.
At the same time, the September 2026 KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs found that candidate availability continued to increase markedly during August. Permanent placements nevertheless rose for the first time since late 2022, while temporary billings also continued to expand.
This creates an important distinction.
The UK does not simply have a labour supply problem. In many areas, it has a skills alignment problem.
CIPD research published in August 2026 found that 31% of employers still had hard-to-fill vacancies, while 14% expected significant recruitment difficulties over the following six months. This was despite subdued overall hiring intentions and fewer vacancies across the economy.
In other words, employers may receive more applications, but securing candidates with the right specialist capabilities can remain difficult.
What Is the UK Skills Gap?
The term “skills gap” is often used broadly, but there are two distinct workforce issues employers need to consider.
A skills shortage occurs when organisations cannot recruit candidates with the skills, qualifications or experience required to fill a vacancy.
A skills gap, more specifically, exists when current employees do not possess all of the skills required to perform their roles to full proficiency.
Both can create workforce pressure.
The UK Employer Skills Survey 2024, updated in June 2026, found that approximately 250,500 vacancies were classified as skill-shortage vacancies. Although that was substantially below the exceptional labour-market conditions recorded in 2022, skill-shortage vacancies still represented 27% of all UK vacancies.
The same research estimated that around 1.26 million UK employees were not fully proficient in their roles, equivalent to 4% of the workforce.
Skills England has subsequently warned that, while the most acute post-pandemic shortages have eased, skills shortages remain persistent over the longer term, particularly within areas including construction, education and manufacturing.
The challenge facing organisations is therefore not simply finding people.
It is finding, developing and retaining people with the right capabilities.
What Skills Are Employers Struggling to Find?
Skills shortages are not confined to emerging technologies or highly specialised technical occupations.
Research from the Department for Work and Pensions found that, among employers identifying skills as a recruitment barrier, 78% cited a lack of technical or job-specific skills and competencies.
However, the problem extends beyond technical expertise. The same research found:
41% cited insufficient soft or personal skills, including areas such as communication and problem-solving
14% identified literacy or numeracy deficiencies
9% reported shortages in digital or IT skills.
That combination is significant.
Employers increasingly require candidates who can combine specialist expertise with stakeholder management, commercial awareness, digital literacy, regulatory understanding and communication skills.
For example, a technically capable finance professional may also need advanced systems knowledge and the ability to communicate financial information to non-finance stakeholders.
A procurement specialist may require category expertise alongside contract management, supplier relationship management, data analysis and knowledge of public procurement regulation.
A HR professional may increasingly need expertise across employee relations, organisational development, HRIS platforms, workforce analytics and employment legislation.
And within Social Housing and Property Management, organisations may require professionals who can combine operational delivery with regulatory awareness, resident engagement, data interpretation and increasingly complex compliance responsibilities.
This is why raw applicant numbers can give employers a misleading picture of talent availability.
Skills Shortages Vary Significantly by Sector
The UK skills gap is not distributed evenly.
Different industries face distinct structural recruitment pressures.
The Employer Skills Survey found particularly high levels of hard-to-fill vacancies among employers in education, health and social work, and manufacturing.
Meanwhile, KPMG and REC data has continued to show variations in recruitment demand between professional sectors. In June 2026, for example, Engineering and Nursing/Medical/Care were the only monitored categories to record increased demand for permanent workers.
This matters for workforce planning.
A national fall in vacancies does not necessarily mean a particular organisation will find it easier to recruit a Building Safety professional in London, a procurement specialist in Birmingham, a Finance Business Partner in Manchester or an experienced Housing professional in Leeds.
Specialist labour markets operate according to their own supply-and-demand dynamics.
Employers therefore need to assess recruitment conditions at a sector, occupation and regional level, rather than relying solely on headline UK labour-market statistics.
Regional Skills Gaps Matter Too
Recruitment pressures also differ considerably throughout the UK.
According to the Employer Skills Survey, the South East and East of England recorded the highest incidence of hard-to-fill vacancies among English regions in 2024, at 10% and 9% of employer sites respectively. London, Yorkshire and the Humber and the West Midlands recorded lower incidences, although specialist shortages remain evident within particular occupations.
Businesses recruiting in London and the South East may therefore encounter different salary, competition and candidate-mobility challenges from organisations hiring across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands.
Likewise, employers in Manchester and the North West, Leeds and Yorkshire, Leicester and the East Midlands, Bristol and the South West or Cardiff and South Wales need to consider the depth of their local and regional talent pool.
Hybrid working has widened recruitment catchments for many professional roles, but it has not eliminated regional skills shortages.
For positions requiring significant office attendance, site presence, community engagement or geographically specific market knowledge, location remains an important part of candidate supply.
The Hidden Workforce Cost of a Skills Gap
A hard-to-fill vacancy creates much more than a recruitment inconvenience.
When specialist roles remain vacant, the workload normally moves elsewhere.
Existing employees take on additional responsibilities. Managers absorb operational work. Projects take longer to deliver. Temporary solutions remain in place for longer than intended.
Over time, these conditions can create:
increased employee workload
reduced productivity
project delays
increased reliance on temporary or interim professionals
management capacity constraints
increased overtime expenditure
greater retention risk
loss of institutional knowledge
reduced organisational resilience.
This helps explain why “workforce pressures” can remain severe even when overall employment growth is subdued.
A team does not need ten vacancies to experience significant pressure.
One vacancy in a highly specialist, regulatory, technical or leadership position can create a disproportionate operational impact.
Are Employers Investing Enough in Skills?
Recruitment cannot solve every skills shortage.
Some capabilities will need to be developed internally through training, progression and workforce development.
However, recent evidence suggests UK employer investment in skills remains under pressure.
Research published by the Learning and Work Institute in September 2026 found that employer investment in training per employee was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2011.
Although approximately 60% of employees continued to participate in training annually, average training duration had fallen from 7.8 days per trainee in 2011 to 5.7 days in 2024.
The Employer Skills Survey similarly estimated total UK employer training expenditure at £53 billion in 2024, down from £59 billion in 2022 when adjusted to 2024 prices. Spending per employee was approximately £1,700, representing a decline of almost 30% compared with 2011.
This creates a potential long-term cycle.
Employers want candidates who already possess increasingly specialised skillsets, but lower investment in workforce development restricts the pipeline of people capable of acquiring those skills.
Employers May Need to Rethink the “Perfect Candidate”
Skills shortages also raise questions about how vacancies are scoped.
Some organisations respond to talent shortages by creating increasingly detailed person specifications.
A vacancy that once required five core competencies may gradually accumulate ten or fifteen requirements.
The talent pool then becomes progressively smaller.
Employers should distinguish between:
Essential capabilities – skills, qualifications or experience genuinely necessary from day one.
Transferable capabilities – adjacent experience that can be applied to the position.
Trainable capabilities – skills a high-quality candidate could realistically acquire after joining.
This is particularly important when recruiting into sectors with chronic or specialist shortages.
Hiring solely from competitors with identical organisational structures, systems and experience requirements can significantly restrict candidate supply.
A candidate who meets 80% of a technical brief but possesses strong learning agility, stakeholder management and transferable sector knowledge may ultimately represent a stronger long-term appointment than waiting indefinitely for a theoretical 100% match.
Skills-Based Hiring Could Widen the Talent Pool
This is where skills-based recruitment can become valuable.
Rather than using previous job titles or rigid career histories as a proxy for capability, organisations can assess candidates against the actual competencies required to perform the role.
That might include:
technical assessments
competency-based interviews
scenario exercises
portfolio evidence
behavioural assessment
transferable sector experience
professional qualifications
demonstrable systems expertise.
This approach can open roles to candidates moving between adjacent industries or functional areas.
For organisations struggling with recurring skills shortages, broadening candidate criteria in a controlled way can unlock parts of the labour market that conventional recruitment processes overlook.
Internal Mobility Must Form Part of Workforce Planning
Not every vacancy needs an external recruitment solution.
Effective workforce planning should identify whether future capabilities can be created internally.
That means understanding which employees could move horizontally, step into more senior responsibilities or undertake structured development.
The CIPD's previous Resourcing and Talent Planning research found that more than half of organisations surveyed had increased their focus on developing talent internally, demonstrating how internal capability-building has already become an important response to talent scarcity.
Succession planning is particularly important in specialist functions where candidate markets are narrow.
Employers that wait until an experienced employee leaves before beginning succession discussions risk creating an immediate capability deficit that external recruitment may not be able to resolve quickly.
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Temporary and Interim Recruitment Can Bridge Critical Skills Gaps
The changing UK recruitment market also highlights the role of flexible staffing.
The KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs found that temporary billings continued to grow strongly during the summer of 2026, while temporary vacancies increased for the first time in two years in July.
For employers, temporary, contract and interim professionals can provide more than short-term headcount.
They can supply specialist capability during:
transformation programmes
organisational restructures
regulatory change
systems implementations
maternity or long-term absence
project delivery
recruitment processes
periods of unusually high demand.
This can be particularly valuable where leaving a specialist position unfilled would create operational, financial or compliance risk.
Recruitment Needs to Become Part of Skills Strategy
The organisations best positioned to manage workforce pressures will increasingly connect recruitment strategy with wider workforce planning.
That means asking more detailed questions before going to market.
What capabilities will the organisation need over the next 12, 24 or 36 months?
Which skills are genuinely scarce?
Which can be developed internally?
Which roles have succession risks?
Where could candidates from adjacent sectors transfer successfully?
Which positions require permanent recruitment, and where could interim expertise provide greater flexibility?
What skills are competitors recruiting for?
And importantly: what will persuade candidates with scarce capabilities to choose your organisation?
Recruitment teams and specialist recruitment partners can provide valuable labour-market intelligence here.
Salary benchmarking, candidate feedback, competitor analysis, regional talent mapping and live recruitment data can help employers understand whether difficulty filling a vacancy is caused by candidate scarcity, remuneration, location, working arrangements, unrealistic specifications or the recruitment process itself.
The Skills Gap Is Ultimately a Workforce Planning Challenge
The phrase “workforce pressures” can make recruitment challenges sound temporary.
Many are not.
While economic conditions will continue to influence hiring volumes, the structural requirement for specialist capabilities will remain.
Skills England's latest assessment makes the situation clear: the exceptional shortages experienced immediately after the pandemic may have eased, but persistent skills constraints continue to affect strategically important areas of the economy.
Employers therefore need to look beyond vacancy numbers.
The more important question is whether their organisation has access to the skills, knowledge and capability required to deliver its objectives.
Recruitment, retention, training, succession planning, internal mobility and contingent staffing should no longer operate as separate workforce conversations.
They are different parts of the same skills strategy.
Looking to Strengthen Your Workforce?
At James Andrews Recruitment Solutions, we work with organisations across the UK to identify, attract and secure specialist talent across Social Housing, Property Management, Finance, HR, Legal, Procurement, Governance, Health & Safety and other professional disciplines.
From permanent recruitment and temporary staffing to understanding candidate availability within specialist regional markets, our consultants can help you build a recruitment strategy around the skills your organisation actually needs.
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