Skills matter enormously when it comes to retaining the UK’s global competitiveness in the creative industries. Forecasts suggest that demand for additional jobs in the sector is set to grow in the coming years. But does the UK’s creative workforce possess the required skills to meet this demand?
In May 2026, I co-authored a report called the Creative Industries Skills Audits in partnership with consultancy Work Advance. This comprised a collection of 12 reports that assessed the skills challenges across the creative industries, accompanied by deep dives into 11 subsectors such as architecture, music and video Games.
To create an evidence base for this report, over the last 18 months we reviewed hundreds of studies and thousands of secondary datapoints, spoke to over 200 creative employers, freelancers and policymakers, and surveyed 1,300 creative employers.
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
What was clear was that the UK creative industries are ambitious for growth. Nearly 50% of employers are looking to expand their workforce in the next three to five years. Video games, music, design and fashion were particularly expecting to grow over that time.
However, that good news is countered by our finding that a third of creative employers recruiting in the past two years had struggled to fill vacancies.
This was primarily down to candidates lacking the right skills, rather than specific qualifications. Even more concerning, 69% of those companies with skills challenges suggested the inability to find the right candidates was having a negative impact on their business operations.
All of this means people looking for jobs in the creative industries will need a variety of skills that can be applied across different roles if they are to keep apace with new technology.
Skills challenges
The skills audits focused on identifying the distinctive issues across each creative subsector. But several common themes emerged across the research.
First, while our work highlighted a range of technical skills in short supply – such as user experience (UX) design, data analysis and video editing – what employers also require is candidates with transferable skills. These are applicable across a variety of job roles, and include effective teamworking, communication, problem solving, finance and marketing skills.
Second, the need for continual upskilling is high in the creative industries. The use of new technology, combined with high levels of innovation means that skills needs to evolve rapidly. Almost a quarter (23%) of employers we surveyed reported that skills gaps were the result of new technology, including the use of AI, machine learning, and upgrades to software such as Adobe Creative Suite.
Skills challenges were found to be most acute for mid-career roles which require around five to ten years of experience, highlighting the need to focus on lifelong learning and continuing professional development.
Third, we found that although a range of factors prevent employers from investing in skills training, the most common were time and cost constraints. These are exacerbated by structural features of the sector.
For instance, the creative industries contain a high share of “microbusinesses” with fewer than ten employees, a large freelance workforce, and work tends to be project-based. These factors make it particularly hard for creative employers to carve out the money and time for skills development.
Opportunities for change
The creative industries workforce is highly educated, with 75% of workers educated to degree-level. Throughout our research, those we spoke to raised concerns about the challenging financial situation for the UK’s higher education sector, including recent cuts to creative courses. If the UK’s creative industries are to maintain their world-leading status, we must get creative higher education onto a more sustainable financial footing.
Technical and vocational education also have an important role to play. We are seeing considerable shifts in post-16 skills policy across the UK. For example, the new apprenticeship unit short courses in England aim to support training in priority sectors like the creative industries. We need to ensure that training routes like these are sufficiently flexible, available in module format and responsive to the evolving skills needs of the sector.
Summit Art Creations / Shutterstock
Complementing this is also a need to enable workers – including creative freelancers who have fewer chances for training – to recognise, capture and demonstrate their learning. The new industry-led skills passports initiative announced in the UK government’s creative industries sector plan could do this by providing a digital record of training.
In addition, our recommendations include the development of a new “pact for skills”, bringing together government, employers, sector skills bodies and training providers. This would emulate key features of the European Commission’s pact, where employers commit to specific, measurable activities to advance the skills agenda, such as industry placement, apprenticeship, training days and mentoring.
Finally, we also suggest the development of “technical excellence networks” to strengthen the skills ecosystems in cities and regions. These would directly respond to local skills needs, and comprise partnerships between further education, universities, industry and other training providers, building on the government’s technical excellence colleges model used in other sectors.
We now have an unprecedented level of evidence on the skills and occupations creative employers say they need. What is now required is a new era of collaboration between industry, government and education, and a focus on ensuring our skills system is sufficiently flexible, agile and responsive to the rapidly evolving needs of the creative industries.
