G&G verified business evidence
In 2024, 12% of UK employers had at least one employee who was not fully proficient in their role.
The Employer Skills Survey 2024 interviewed 22,712 employers across the UK. A skills gap means an existing employee is judged not fully proficient in their role.
Representative UK employer survey commissioned by the Department for Education.
Department for Education
Employer Skills Survey 2024
The survey reports that 12% of employers had at least one employee not fully proficient.
Department for Education. Employer Skills Survey 2024. 24th of July, 2025. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/employer-skills-survey/2024
Skills gaps can restrict productivity, service quality and the ability to adopt new systems. This statistic gives SMEs a national benchmark, but the operational importance depends on how many employees are affected and whether the missing skills are critical to the business.
The 12% employer incidence was down from 15% in 2022 and similar to 13% in 2017. Employers identified about 1.26 million employees with a skills gap, equal to 4.0% of the workforce. Incidence was 14% in Scotland, 12% in England and Wales and 11% in Northern Ireland. Education employers were most likely to report any gap (17%), followed by hotels and restaurants (15%). The share of employees affected was highest in hotels and restaurants (6.2%), wholesale and retail (5.3%) and primary industries and utilities (5.2%). Incidence rose from 4% at sites with 2 to 4 employees to 38% at sites with 100 or more employees.
Most employers did not report a skills gap, and both incidence and workforce density fell from 2022. Larger sites were more likely to report at least one gap partly because they employ more people, so incidence should be read alongside the 4.0% workforce measure. Even a low headcount can be material to an SME when the affected role is commercially or operationally critical.
A skills gap is based on an employer's judgement that an existing employee is not fully proficient; it is not an independent assessment or a count of vacancies. The survey covers employer sites with at least two people on payroll and excludes non-employers. Incidence and density measure different things, and sector, nation and size estimates have sampling uncertainty. The measure does not establish why a gap arose or its financial effect.
G&G perspective: maintain a role-based skills matrix and prioritise gaps that affect revenue, compliance, customer experience or operational resilience. Decide whether each gap is best addressed through coaching, formal training, recruitment, job redesign or external expertise. Reassess proficiency after the intervention instead of treating attendance as completion.
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