The Assessment of priority skills to 2030 report offers a detailed analysis of future employment needs across ten critical sectors, aligned with the government’s Industrial Strategy and Plan for Change, and highlights the scale of demand for apprenticeships and broader skills training.
GOV.UK writes:
… Skills England’s vision is to build our nation’s world class skills, enabling growth and opportunity. To do this we will understand our nation’s skills needs and improve our skills offer. Working with partners across government and beyond, we will provide the single authoritative voice on the country’s current and future skills needs. This will also allow us to co-create and refine a set of training products and solutions with employers and other partners to meet labour market and economic need.
In September 2024, we published our first report Driving growth and widening opportunities, which outlined how skills can drive UK growth, along with an initial assessment of skills needs in the economy. In June 2025, we followed this up with Skills England: Skills for growth and opportunity, which summarised findings of our analysis and engagement with sectors on the growth and skills offer, and skills needs assessments for 10 priority sectors.
The Assessment of priority skills to 2030 report examines the future direct employment demand across 10 key sectors critical to the government’s Industrial Strategy and Plan for Change and identifies the education pathways associated with priority occupations in these sectors. These have been developed in collaboration with government departments responsible for leading on each sector using the best evidence available, and is the first time a quantitative assessment of skills needs has been made that looks across all of these sectors, rather than focussing on the needs of a single sector.
This initial assessment provides valuable information to help prioritise where training can most effectively support employment in jobs delivering on government and industry priorities. This is a first step towards bringing together sector-specific estimates in a consistent and comparable way to support policymaking on skills training. The methods in this report are new, and we will develop them further, working with local and industry stakeholders to develop our evidence base and widen the scope of the analysis.
The report uses occupations, as defined by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes, to provide an indication of the skills needs for the sectors. These allow for a consistent approach and cross-sector comparison. However, they are an approximation and do not work for all types of employment, particularly in highly specialised and emerging roles. They also do not specifically cover consideration of important skills like critical thinking, and leadership. We will be working closely with departments across government to refine our methodology to capture further skills needs across the economy.
All estimates of future employment are highly uncertain and their inclusion here is not for making precise forecasts of employment levels. Rather, the aim is to provide information about the general nature of changing employment patterns and their implications for skill requirements. The projections should be regarded as indicative of general trends and orders of magnitude, given the assumptions set out in the methodology section.
