Skills matter enormously when it comes to retaining the UK’s global competitiveness in the creative industries. Forecasts suggest that demand for additional jobs in the sector is set to grow in the coming years. But does the UK’s creative workforce possess the required skills to meet this demand?

In May 2026, I co-authored a report called the Creative Industries Skills Audits in partnership with consultancy Work Advance. This comprised a collection of 12 reports that assessed the skills challenges across the creative industries, accompanied by deep dives into 11 subsectors such as architecture, music and video Games.

To create an evidence base for this report, over the last 18 months we reviewed hundreds of studies and thousands of secondary datapoints, spoke to over 200 creative employers, freelancers and policymakers, and surveyed 1,300 creative employers.

This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

What was clear was that the UK creative industries are ambitious for growth. Nearly 50% of employers are looking to expand their workforce in the next three to five years. Video games, music, design and fashion were particularly expecting to grow over that time.

However, that good news is countered by our finding that a third of creative employers recruiting in the past two years had struggled to fill vacancies.

This was primarily down to candidates........

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