The UK skills landscape is evolving rapidly, with employers increasingly seeking “oven-ready talent” possessing in-demand technical skills. However, Peter Cheese, CEO of the CIPD the UK’s professional body for HR, learning and development stresses the importance of looking beyond immediate technical competencies to include potential and human skills.
Speaking at the UK Hiring Taskforce launch held at the Houses of Parliament on 16 May 2025, Cheese addressed an audience of 200 HR leaders and business executives. He highlighted that alongside closing skills gaps, employers must also assess candidates for characteristics like attitude, aptitude to learn, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
“The more we debate the future of work, AI’s impact on jobs, and skills transformation, the more we come back to these core human skills,” Cheese said.
He emphasized the need to incorporate humanities knowledge into workforce development to build these essential capabilities. “People talk about the half-life of job skills being somewhere between three and four years. In other words, every three or four years, we’ll have to retrain half of our workforce,” he added.
Access to and retention of talent remain critical challenges for business leaders worldwide. Cheese noted, “Almost every organisation says they can’t find all the skills. But when you question them further, they admit they have been too focused on hiring what I’ve described as ‘oven-ready employees’ and they don’t exist.”
Cheese cautioned against the narrow focus on technical skills alone: “The world is not going to be a better place if all we have are a lot of tech people. Frankly, we need humanity to work alongside that as well.”
He urged employers to expand their recruiting mindset to embrace potential and human skills in addition to technical expertise, to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of work.
Sources – Recruiter News And Business Intelligence
