The skills UK employers want in 2026: what the latest survey found

The Employer Skills Survey is the Department for Education's large survey of UK employers, funded jointly with the Scottish and Welsh Governments and Northern Ireland's Department for the Economy, and carried out by IFF Research. The 2024 edition interviewed 22,712 employers by telephone between June 2024 and January 2025. It covers sites with at least two people on the payroll. The key figures were published as official statistics on 24 July 2025, and the full UK report followed in November 2025. It is the latest edition.

Two measures matter for this guide:

• Skill-shortage vacancies are vacancies that are hard to fill because applicants lack the skills, qualifications or experience needed. Employers reported 250,500 of them in 2024, 27% of all vacancies (down from 36% in 2022, when the number of vacancies was the highest in the survey's history).
• Skills gaps are existing staff their employer judges not fully proficient. Employers put that at 1.26 million people, or 4.0% of the workforce, the lowest in the survey's history.

Employers with either problem were read a list of skills and asked which were lacking. So the tables below show which skills are hardest to find, which is not quite the same as a list of everything employers value. A skill almost every applicant has will not appear, however much it matters.

59% of employers expected to need to upskill their staff in the next 12 months, down from 62% in 2022. The most common reasons were new technologies or equipment (37%), new laws or regulations (37%), new products and services (34%) and new working practices (32%).

2024 was the first year the survey asked about artificial intelligence. 14% of employers said their site used it, rising to about a quarter of those with 100 or more staff, and a lack of AI skills was behind 5% of digital skills gaps among existing staff. Employers that use AI were more likely to expect to need to upskill their staff (74% against 56%).

For a longer view, our guide to the best careers for the future covers the published projections of jobs and skills to 2035.

• Specialist knowledge: this is the gap you usually have to close. Look for the qualification, short course or adult apprenticeship that the new job asks for, and start it before you apply if you can.
• Managing time and priorities: describe a time you ran several deadlines or a caseload at once, and what you dropped or delegated to get the important things done.
• Solving complex problems: pick one real problem, explain what made it hard, what you did and what changed as a result. One detailed example beats a list of adjectives.
• Handling feelings, yours and other people's: complaints, upset customers, patients or parents, and difficult conversations with colleagues all count.
• Knowledge of the employer's products and services: this is one gap you can start closing before an interview. Read what they sell or provide, who their customers are, and what has changed for them recently.
• Managing or motivating others: you do not need a manager title. Training a new starter, leading a project or organising a rota is evidence.

Our guides to transferable skills and writing a CV for a career change go into this in more detail.