To Address our Skills Crisis UK Businesses need to Look Inward  

Successive governments have long promised to fix the UK’s skills and productivity problem. We have seen new qualifications, bootcamps and programmes in all directions. Yet, productivity growth has been weak for more than a decade, and employers continue to report persistent skills gaps. The country is producing more avenues for learning, but not getting enough out of them.  

Last week, the Chancellor stood up and delivered a Budget that leans heavily on productivity revival to square the fiscal circle. By extension, we saw more support for training and skills programmes – the government unveiled a “sweeping” £1.5bn skills package aimed at tackling the UK’s entrenched labour shortages and sluggish productivity.  

But, if the past decade is any guide, this instinct to increase the bottom-up supply of skills in the system and hope productivity follows is not working. The uncomfortable truth is that we are misdiagnosing the problem. It is not just about how many skills we create. It is about the priority and attention learning gets once people are in the job. 

A system that ignores how people learn 

Inside most businesses, ‘learning’ still means enrolling staff on a course, asking them to click through modules and marking completion. The systems that sit underneath this were built to manage and deliver content on a large scale and keep records, not to improve performance. 

That leads to three problems: 

First, we track completions, not understanding. Most businesses can say how many people finished a course but very few can show whether those people understood the material or can apply it with confidence. 

Second, learning is kept separate from work. Training is scheduled around the day job, not woven into it. Staff log on to a portal, then return to a manager who has neither the time nor the tools to help them use what they have learned. Knowledge fades and the organisation concludes that training does not work. 

Third, leaders would not run the business without reliable financial data, yet many run it without a clear view of skills. Basic questions go unanswered: Which teams understand the latest regulation? How long does it take a new hire to reach full productivity? Where do the same mistakes keep appearing? Leaders are simply flying blind.  

Looking inward is uncomfortable, but essential 

Learning has been deprioritised for so long that many leaders treat it as a cost to manage, not an asset to develop. That has to stop. Learning is one of the few levers businesses can control directly, no matter what policy or economic changes happen around them. 

I believe learning and understanding are among the most powerful resources an organisation holds. When businesses can measure and feel their impact, and people rediscover the excitement of learning, innovation accelerates and productivity begins to rise. 

The impacts will not appear overnight. The Office for Budget Responsibility has already warned that weaker productivity could open up a multibillion pound hole in the public finances. But, if the UK is serious about escaping its productivity rut, businesses looking inward at learning needs to be a central pillar. 

The real question isn’t what the Chancellor announced this week, it’s what companies themselves will begin to do differently on Monday morning.  

What should businesses be doing?  

If businesses want more from the skills they already pay for, they need to change how learning is measured and experienced. Content is not the problem. The gap is useable intelligence about what people understand, where capability is growing, and where it needs work.  

Fortunately, there has never been a better moment to take action. The technology now exists to individualise learning, map capability, and feed real-time insight back into where learning is directed.  

Learning can be turned into data. Every course, module or resource can generate signals, not just completions, giving you the raw materials needed to build a continuous loop of data, intelligence, and more targeted learning. That data can then be turned into a live, data-driven picture of skills, confidence, and risk across the organisation. Leaders and managers can now see, at a glance, where knowledge is strong, where it is fragile, and where it is missing altogether.  

When learning becomes measurable, it stops being activity for activity’s sake. People know what they’re improving, managers know where support is needed, and organisations can focus effort where it actually moves performance. This shift – from box-ticking to targeted capability-building – is what turns learning into a genuine driver of productivity. 

This is how the UK starts to climb out of its productivity rut.  

By Dr Chibeza Agley, Co-Founder and CEO, Obrizum