Creative industries’ ‘hard to fill’ jobs down to skills shortages – report

It links these skills gaps to burgeoning technologies including artificial intelligence, and suggests that creative industry employers are facing serious skills deficiencies – with workers urgently needing to improve their aptitude when it comes to things such as advanced or specialist IT skills and software.

But despite this mismatch, the report finds that employers are "not investing sufficiently in upskilling their workforce", with 45% failing to provide any training in the year leading up to 2022.

In comparison, only 40% of employers in other industries neglected to invest in such career development for their team.

Skills shortages are most pronounced for higher-skilled roles, with 78% of creative industry employers reporting deficiencies in areas where the most qualified and experienced workers are needed – compared with just 31% of leaders in other sectors.

This is despite considerable growth by the creative industries, which saw employment increase from 1.7 million to 2.4 million between 2013 and 2023, the equivalent of 700,000 additional jobs.

The report, authored by Lesley Giles, Heather Carey and Dave O’Brien, makes a number of recommendations to policymakers, including:

• Ensuring "stronger mechanisms" for collaboration between education and industry;
• Emphasising the importance of investment by employers in their employees’ skills through training opportunities;
• Conducting further research and data collection into the specific needs of creative industry sub-sectors.

Professor Hasan Bakhshi, director of the Creative Industries PEC, said: "The creative industries, a priority growth sector for the government, are not alone in having a skills mismatch, reflecting the wider challenges in UK education and skills, but disproportionate numbers of the sector’s ‘hard-to-fill vacancies’ are attributable to a skills shortage.

"We need nothing less than a system change across UK schools, technical education, universities, continuous professional development and careers pathways to enable the creative economy to realise its growth potential."