The answer to the skills
crisis hides in plain sight.

In a world of constant flux, organisations can only be as adaptable as their people and their skills. Today, over half of learning and talent development professionals in the United Kingdom see a skills crisis, with 57% agreeing, “My executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy.”

To address this gap, learning is critical—but new LinkedIn data says there’s much more to it. Learning combined with career development (leadership training, coaching, internal mobility, and more) accelerates the flow of critical skills to keep pace with business needs.

But why is career development—a classic idea with new relevance—so powerful for adaptability and growth? Consider that, globally, career progress is people’s No.1 motivation to learn and when employees don’t move ahead, they leave and take their skills elsewhere. By investing in career development, employers in the UK can counteract the anxiety that comes with rapid change by building loyalty, energy, and innovation for the next era of work. In short, great companies are built on great careers.

Read on for insights and advice to put career-driven learning into action.

Table of contents

Career development champions

Capitalising on GAI

Tips for L&D success

Go deeper with playbooks

Unlocked Courses

Methodology

Acknowledgements

In terms of metrics like internal mobility rate and new skills delivered for the business, what are organisations that embrace career development gaining over those that do not? To help answer this question, LinkedIn used survey responses to identify where organisations rank on a career development maturity curve, with the most mature qualifying as “career development champions.” 

The upshot: only 33% of organisations in the UK fall into the career development champions category with robust programmes that yield business results. Globally, 31% have career development programmes with limited adoption, and 33% have no initiatives or are just getting started.

Globally, mature career development initiatives correlate with positive outlook for profitability, confidence to attract and retain talent, and GAI adoption.

The data in this report comes from three primary sources: interviews with global talent leaders; the annual Workplace Learning survey; and studies of LinkedIn platform data derived from 1 billion members, 14 million jobs, and 5 million profile updates per minute. Read full methodology here

Data gathered from the LinkedIn platform also shows positive outcomes for organisations that prioritise career development. For this analysis, LinkedIn created a Career Development Index that scored organisations on four indicators of career support: commitments on the organisation’s company page; keywords in job postings; prevalence of leadership development skills within the employee base; and high levels of internal mobility.

Based on their scores, companies were split into five groups of equal size, called quintiles. The top group with the highest scores was compared to the bottom group to see how their results differed. Compared to those who score low, global organisations with strong index scores are more likely to see three positive outcomes: 

•  More employees who engage with learning—crucial for maintaining a flow of business-relevant skills.

•  Higher rate of promotions—an indicator that more employees are achieving impactful job performance.

•  Higher rate of promotions into positions of management and leadership—signifying a healthy pipeline of people who have institutional knowledge and strategic acumen. 

Organisations scoring high on the Career Development Index have higher rates of learner engagement and job promotions.

Of course, promotions are not the only way to help employees feel a sense of career progress. Upskilling, coaching, and internal role changes help people feel valued, engaged, and more likely to stay with their organisation. 

"Our employees are the most valuable assets our company has. When we invest in their professional development and skills, they perform well, feel valued, trust our company and stay with us". says Denise Bahro, Digital Learning Consultant at TUI Musement

of learning and development (L&D) pros in the UK agree continuous learning is more important than ever for career success.

The top 10 skills lost to attrition are the most valuable to the company and the hardest to replace globally.

of organisations in the UK are concerned about employee retention.

In order to improve their retention rates, 61% of UK organisations provide employees with learning opportunities, while wellness programmes and benefits closely follow at 60%. 

“AI has the potential to enhance the way we work and offer development as talent development professionals”, says  Miranda Kofoed Talent Performance Lead at Lowell. “We are leaning into ways that can help us curate and generate content at speed and leverage AI features that allow our workforce to access content/knowledge and practise core skills in seconds.”

Taking a more detailed look at the survey data, the research looks at four levels of GAI upskilling: not yet started, emerging, accelerating, and leading. Career development champions outpace non-champions at both the accelerating and leading levels of GAI adoption, indicating the strong relationship between career support and future-facing upskilling. 

The state of GAI adoption: Globally, career development champions show significant adoption compared to others.

Many career development champions view GAI as a competitive advantage that they can scale across their organisations—upskilling employees on a wide range of roles and levels of proficiency. For example, administrative assistants benefit from introductory GAI fluency while engineers require highly technical skills to build and deploy AI-based systems.

And many see that taking steps to future-proof technology should go hand-in-hand with developing people. Compared to non-champions, career development champions around the globe are 32% percent more likely to be deploying GAI training programmes this year, and 88% more likely to offer career-enhancing gig opportunities or project-based learning. Even though champions already offer tangible career support for employees, they are 33% more likely to agree that career development is more of a priority this year.

So what are the most common best practices for career-building initiatives? In-house training comes out on top, with 74% of organisations in the UK offering it.

The most common career development practices in the UK are in-house training programmes and leadership training.

What’s standing in the way of a leap forward in career development? It seems that managers, employees, and talent teams are all stretched too thin to go beyond daily work and make progress for their teams, themselves, and their organisations.

Asked to choose the top three barriers standing in the way of career development, respondents in the UK say that a lack of time and resources is a strong pain point: 47% say managers lack proper support; 41% say employees lack support; and 33% say talent teams themselves lack support.

But only 8% of survey respondents in the UK cite, “leadership doesn’t value career development” as one of their top three barriers. While it appears that most leadership teams are not standing in the way of career development, they aren’t doing enough to address the systemic challenges to allow managers, employees, and talent teams to properly prioritise it.

Talent leaders must bring this story to life for the C-suite and articulate what’s needed to drive bottom-line results. To help this conversation, here are five talent strategy foundations that organisations can adopt to create business value with career development and continuous learning.

It’s a simple idea—put the right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs, at the right time. But most talent leaders know that building an agile skills ecosystem is easier said than done.

Generative artificial intelligence is here to help. While GAI is revolutionising in-demand skills, it’s also delivering dynamic, on-demand, and personalised learning technology to help organisations keep up. Many L&D pros in the UK are leaning in to use GAI for their programmes, with 78% exploring, experimenting, or integrating it into their work.

Other talent development practices include tracking the skills-gap data, creating skills-based career paths, collaborating with executives and talent colleagues, and using skills assessments. Not surprisingly, agile practices are more common for career development champions Check out the Skills Playbook for more tips and strategies.

Globally, skills-based talent strategies are more prevalent for career development champions and include greater collaboration with executives and cross-functional HR teams.

Focusing on internal mobility helps build an agile workforce that can apply transferable skills and cross-functional knowledge across the organisation. Globally, around half of both career development champions (55%) and all other survey respondents (48%) see internal mobility as a higher priority in the year ahead.

Globally, more than half of career development champions see internal mobility as a rising priority.

of L&D pros in the UK say human skills are increasingly important.