UK tech teams are heavily impacted by skills gaps
Every tech leader surveyed in the UK, 100%, points to skills gaps as a clear barrier to success. This isn’t some minor efficiency issue. It’s operational friction that compounds over time. The result? More pressure on employees who already have the expertise. Their workload increases. Stress spikes. Burnout spreads. Talent leaves. And projects stall.
Nearly half of UK organizations have already gone further than just internal pressure. They’ve had to abandon projects altogether because they didn’t have the right technical skillsets in-house. That’s lost innovation, lost speed, and likely lost market share.
For leadership, this matters more than ever. If your organization can’t execute due to missing skillsets, you don’t just fall behind, you exit the race. The question isn’t whether this is a priority. It’s how fast you can respond. You need to look at where the friction lives inside teams, find the gaps, and decide, build or buy. Either you invest in upskilling your team now or spend a lot more trying to find new hires to replace them later.
88% of UK tech executives already agree that upskilling is cheaper than hiring. So the decision isn’t a trade-off, it’s about speed and discipline. Close the capability gap. Deliver results. Move forward.
IT support, cloud computing, and automation are top priorities, but your skill focus might be misaligned
UK tech practitioners name IT support, cloud computing, and software automation as their highest priorities. Solid choices. These are foundational to digital infrastructure and scale. But that’s only part of the story.
What’s missing is alignment with their pain points. The biggest capability gaps in UK tech teams aren’t in support or automation. They’re in cybersecurity, cloud, and DevOps. That tells you something’s off in how leaders are planning versus what teams are actually missing.
If your workforce is focused on priorities that don’t align with the most constrained capability areas, the result is friction, not progress. You slow innovation. You introduce risk, especially in things like cybersecurity, where exposure due to short staffing can hurt your company far beyond IT.
This is what leadership needs to fix. Strategic workforce planning must become dynamic. You need to identify real-time gaps and invest in skills development precisely where it’s needed. That’s not just training for training’s sake. It’s targeted action that maps directly to capability runway, productivity, and business outcomes.
The data’s clear: Practitioners believe cybersecurity, AI/ML, and cloud computing are the most important skills to learn next year. Business professionals rank AI/ML, DevOps, and cloud. Your teams are telling you where to invest. Listen. Then act.
Cloud computing is the top tech growth area for UK businesses
Cloud leads the list in the UK. According to local tech leaders, it’s the single most important area of growth for their organizations over the next 12 months. Cybersecurity and data are next in line, followed by AI and machine learning. That order matters. Plenty of noise exists around AI, but most decision-makers are focusing first on underlying infrastructure, getting the fundamentals right.
Why? Because scalable, secure, and efficient cloud systems aren’t optional anymore. They’re core. Every system your business depends on, your operations, your product lifecycle, your customer delivery, is becoming more interdependent and more cloud-reliant. If your organization isn’t making strategic investments in cloud capability, you’re introducing complexity and risk that can delay everything else, including AI readiness.
Cybersecurity and data are close seconds because they’re directly tied to trust and performance. Leaders know breaches and data loss aren’t interpersonal issues, they’re existential ones. Technical resilience in these areas isn’t about perfection; it’s about preparedness and flexibility. And both depend heavily on skilled talent that understands not just how the technology works but how to apply it under pressure.
AI and ML are still in the mix, but ranked fourth. That’s not a rejection of future-looking tech. It’s an acknowledgment that the most ambitious use cases can’t materialize without strong foundations. Secure your cloud. Build clean data pipelines. Empower cybersecurity talent. Only then do AI and automation become scalable across your business.
Communication is the top soft skill for UK technologists
Across the board, UK tech leaders and practitioners rank communication as the most critical soft skill in today’s environment. That’s more than just being well-spoken. It’s about clarity, context, and the ability to align across disciplines. As systems become more complex, your teams need to talk to one another, easily, confidently, without misunderstanding.
We’re not talking about adding superficial collaboration platforms or redundant status meetings. We’re talking about the ability to articulate technical priorities in a way that directly ties to outcomes. Engineering should clearly communicate impact to product. Security should surface risk in business terms. Communication removes guesswork, and the best teams don’t guess. They execute with clarity.
Adaptability and creativity rank next. No surprise there. This ecosystem changes fast. What’s new today can become a constraint three quarters from now. You want people whose mindset is flexible and outcome-oriented. Creativity counts because growth isn’t just about iteration, it’s about taking what you have, assessing the constraints, and finding the next move that unlocks value.
For executives, this means soft skills aren’t soft outcomes. They’re business-critical. Upskilling isn’t just for technical knowledge. You need to build communication and adaptability into your leadership pipeline before it becomes the bottleneck in delivering real results.
Career motivations for tech learning differ between IT and non-IT professionals
The motivations behind why people build tech skills aren’t uniform, especially in the UK market. Among IT professionals, 52% are primarily driven by the prospect of higher salaries. Career flexibility and personal achievement follow close behind. This signals a workforce that sees technical expertise as the clearest path to financial growth and autonomy.
Non-technical professionals approach learning from a different angle. For them, it’s less about compensation and more about confidence, job security, and advancement. Over half, 54%—want to feel more capable navigating a tech-centric business environment, while 52% view tech skills as a hedge against disruption. Half see it as essential for moving up the ladder.
This is useful context for any executive investing in learning and development. A universal training strategy may fall flat. Diverse motivations require tailored upskilling models. For IT, link training to measurable career outcomes and new opportunities. For business professionals, highlight competence, relevance, and the doors that technical literacy can open inside the company.
The key is design. Build learning paths that reflect the expectations of the people you want to advance. Don’t just offer access to courses, offer focused growth that stays aligned with career momentum. The result is higher retention, stronger performance, and fewer bottlenecks between your business strategy and your talent execution.
Formal education still carries weight in UK tech hiring, but it’s not the only path in
In the UK, formal education still holds more influence in tech hiring than in markets like the US or India. Employers often expect candidates to show degrees in computer science or information technology as proof of readiness. That mindset isn’t fading as fast in this region. And yes, a degree can be useful, but relying on that alone limits your reach.
The hiring landscape is shifting, even in the UK. More practitioners are using non-traditional paths, bootcamps, online credentials, independent certifications, to get into tech and move up. These formats give motivated individuals a faster, more focused route to skill acquisition. And, importantly, they often produce candidates with current, task-ready knowledge.
Executives need to rethink how they balance credential expectations with performance indicators. If you weigh degrees too heavily, you risk filtering out talent that’s qualified, capable, and ready to contribute immediately. Formal education shows discipline and foundation. But it doesn’t always show what someone can deliver in your environment today.
The recommendation is simple: diversify who you let in. Shortlist candidates based on what they know and what they’ve done, not just where they studied. For talent strategy, this widens your pool and helps you build teams with a broader spectrum of thinking and execution styles. That kind of diversity becomes a real competitive advantage.
Microcredentials are driving promotions in UK tech careers
Microcredentials aren’t just a trend, they are a core signal of professional advancement. In the UK, both IT and non-IT professionals identify them as the leading factor in earning promotions and pay raises. Compact and often role-specific, these credentials, digital badges, certifications from platforms like AWS, CompTIA, or Cisco, let professionals demonstrate capability in exactly the areas companies need.
For practitioners, these recognitions offer two key advantages: speed and focus. Instead of broad, multi-year education commitments, microcredentials give immediate evidence of proficiency in core skills like cloud deployment, network security, or DevOps operations. They make performance visible and verifiable.
Tech executives in the UK are aligned here. They recognize these formats as proof of readiness. When you see someone earning top-tier badges in areas aligned to your tech roadmap, the decision becomes simpler, they didn’t just learn something, they proved they can apply it.
For company leaders, the takeaway is simple: build internal development tracks that encourage and reward microcredential achievement. Map certifications to promotions, to pay increases, to expanded responsibilities. Make it clear that practical expertise is tracked, seen, and valued. This drives performance, reduces time-to-impact, and builds a deeper internal talent bench at a lower cost than external hires.
Upskilling is more Cost-Effective than hiring, yet employees still say it’s not enough
The numbers tell a clear story. In the UK, 88% of tech leaders agree that upskilling costs less than hiring. On average, companies are spending £5,000 to £10,000 for every new IT hire. By contrast, most spend less than £5,000 when upskilling existing team members. More value, more predictability, and fewer onboarding delays.
But here’s the disconnect: while leadership says learning is a strategic priority, employees say the support doesn’t match the ambition. Nearly all, 95% of UK IT and business professionals, report needing more resources to develop new tech skills. This includes access to platforms, time allocated during work hours, and visible support from leadership.
It’s not just about giving access to learning systems. It’s about building a framework around that access. 96% of UK leaders claim to prioritize a learning culture, using tools like dedicated platforms, manager-enabled learning time, and backing from executive leadership. That’s a good foundation, now it needs scale and consistency.
The next step is to remove friction. If your people are willing to learn, make it easy. Shorten the time between learning and application. Align skill development with real project work. Fund certification paths. You’ll retain more talent, re-skill faster, and avoid competing for external hires each time the demand shifts.
Leadership already has the evidence. Upskilling works. What’s left is to ensure the execution actually delivers on the outcomes employees are ready to pursue.
UK organizations are actively measuring the ROI of upskilling, and it’s paying off
In the UK, tech leaders aren’t just investing in skill-building, they’re measuring it. And the metrics are clear. The most common indicators for tracking skill outcomes are increased team productivity (48%), financial improvements like revenue growth or cost savings (44%), and formal evidence of capability such as performance ratings, promotions, and skill assessment results (42%).
What this confirms is that learning and development is no longer treated as an indirect benefit. It’s being evaluated the same way you’d evaluate any strategic investment, through business impact. Continuous training participation, test results, and peer feedback are used as early signals. But the real test is whether those skills translate to performance improvements.
This is how high-functioning organizations stabilize productivity during disruption. They’re not relying on intuition or top-down guesswork. They’re implementing upskilling programs with defined outcomes, then monitoring closely to refine, redirect, or accelerate deployment based on what actually works.
For executives, this is a shift worth leaning into. Running learning programs without ROI tracking lowers your leverage. It becomes hard to sustain executive buy-in or budget growth. On the other hand, clear KPIs, tied to productivity, cost savings, or market acceleration, turn skill-building into a defensible, repeatable lever for growth. And more importantly, it tells your people you’re serious about advancing not just the business, but their place in it.
In conclusion
None of this is theoretical. The UK tech ecosystem is hitting real limits, talent shortages, stalled projects, and rising pressure on already stretched teams. The challenges aren’t vague, and the solutions aren’t out of reach. You have the data, and now it’s a matter of execution.
Refocus your roadmap on closing the skills that matter, cybersecurity, cloud, DevOps. Shift hiring expectations away from formal degrees and toward proof of outcomes. Push microcredentials, fund targeted upskilling, and watch how fast internal capability compounds when friction is removed.
If productivity, innovation, and resilience sit at the center of your strategy, then skills development is not a support function, it’s a direct growth lever. Efficient teams don’t just move faster, they solve deeper and scale sharper. And that starts when you stop waiting for perfect hires and start building the workforce you actually need.
