Stop chasing, start building: how to overcome skills shortages

The skills shortage isn’t going anywhere – but the way we solve it needs to change. Spend five minutes talking to most employers right now and the same topic comes up sooner or later: skills. Or more specifically, the lack of them.

Finding the right people for specialist roles has been difficult for a while. In some sectors it’s starting to feel like a permanent condition rather than a temporary blip. The list is long, and growing – including engineering, construction, digital and social care.

At the same time, the wider economic picture isn’t exactly calm. UK growth has been subdued recently, with the Office for National Statistics reporting zero growth at the start of the year. Add global uncertainty into the mix, geopolitical tensions, rising energy prices – and you’ve got businesses understandably feeling cautious about hiring.

But even when hiring slows down, the demand for skills doesn’t magically disappear. Projects still need doing. Services still need delivering. Organisations still need capable people who can actually make things happen. So the question becomes: where do those skills come from? And increasingly, the answer isn’t “the external market”.

Reconsidering recruitment strategies

For years, recruitment has often followed a fairly simple model. Write a job description. List ten years’ experience. Add a handful of very specific technical requirements. Then hope someone out there already ticks every box. Sometimes that works. But when the labour market tightens, that strategy starts to fall apart pretty quickly.

The perfect candidate either doesn’t exist, or someone else hires them first. Which is why more organisations are stepping back and asking a slightly different question: What if we stopped trying to buy skills and started building them instead? It sounds obvious. But it’s a big shift. Because building skills means thinking seriously about career progression, internal development, apprenticeships, and structured learning – not just recruitment campaigns.

Apprenticeships are quietly becoming much more popular

One of the most interesting shifts happening right now is around apprenticeships. Tutoring platform FindTutors, recently highlighted how interest in apprenticeships and vocational training increased by around nine per cent across the UK in 2025. That might not sound huge. But the regional data tells a bigger story. The biggest surge in searches came from Yorkshire and the Humber, at 43 per cent above the national average. The North East followed at 35 per cent above average, and the East Midlands was close behind at 34 per cent.

Regions that struggle with skills shortages are also the ones showing the strongest appetite for practical training routes. And it’s not just school leavers looking. Helen Russell, director of the Right Track Consultancy and an early careers specialist who works directly with candidates, has noticed a real change in behaviour over the past year.

More adults are investigating if they can use apprenticeships as a way to retrain or move into completely different careers. That “earn while you learn” model has obvious appeal. Especially when the alternative might involve years of student debt and uncertain job prospects. There’s also been a cultural shift.

Apprenticeships are more widely accepted as a credible pathway into professional and degree-level roles, not some kind of second-best option.

The critical piece many organisations overlook: role clarity

Of course, creating a pipeline of future talent doesn’t happen by accident. And this is where many organisations hit a stumbling block. They want apprenticeships. They want career pathways. They want internal progression. But when you look closely, the structure behind those ambitions isn’t always there.

This is where job evaluation becomes really important, even if it doesn’t sound particularly exciting. A proper job evaluation framework helps organisations answer some surprisingly fundamental questions: What does each role actually involve? How do responsibilities change as someone develops? What does progression realistically look like? Without that clarity, development pathways become muddled. Employees can’t see how to move forward. Managers struggle to define expectations. Recruitment messaging becomes vague.

But when roles are clearly differentiated, with defined responsibilities and competencies, something interesting happens. Career pathways start to make sense. Suddenly you can show someone how an entry-level role could develop into a specialist or leadership position over time. That’s powerful for recruitment. And even more powerful for retention.

Upskilling keeps people around

Let’s talk about retention for a moment. Development opportunities change the employment proposition. When people can see clear progression – new responsibilities, training opportunities, qualifications, internal mobility – they are far more likely to stay. Not forever, perhaps. But long enough to build real expertise.

Upskilling doesn’t always need to be elaborate either. Sometimes it’s professional training. Sometimes it’s mentoring. Sometimes it’s just about giving someone the chance to try something new. Even small changes can make a big difference.

The other piece of the puzzle: widening access

There is another dimension to the skills shortage that organisations sometimes overlook. Access. Certain groups are still underrepresented, often because of structural barriers rather than a lack of ability.

Take the motherhood penalty as an example. Analysis of Office for National Statistics data shows that mothers earn, on average, £302 less per week than fathers, which is a gap of around 33%. That difference is often driven by reduced hours or stepping back from progression opportunities because workplace expectations simply aren’t flexible enough. From a talent perspective, that is a huge missed opportunity. Experienced professionals are effectively pushed out of career development pathways at the exact point when their expertise could be most valuable.

Employers who rethink flexibility – genuine flexibility, not just policies on paper – can unlock a highly skilled and motivated talent pool that many competitors are ignoring. And again, that is not just about fairness. It’s about solving workforce challenges.

A different mindset

The skills shortage conversation often focuses on what the labour market isn’t delivering. Not enough engineers. Not enough technicians. Not enough digital specialists. All true. But perhaps the more useful question is this: What if organisations focused less on finding finished talent and more on developing future expertise? That means apprenticeships. Clear job evaluation and role structures. Visible career pathways. Genuine investment in learning.

It is not the fastest solution. Building talent pipelines takes time. But in a labour market where uncertainty seems to be the only constant, organisations that grow their own skills may end up with something extremely valuable. A workforce that evolves with them. And that’s a far more sustainable strategy than endlessly searching for the mythical “perfect candidate”.