A new study has revealed the most in-demand skills in the UK this year with nursing, finance and business auditing ranking at the top.

The study conducted by CIMSPA (The Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity) has evaluated data from labour analytics specialists EMSI to find potential gaps in the UK’s workplace skill sets.

Study glossary

• Hard skills: traits for jobs within sport and physical activity ie. circuit training
• Soft skills: traits that are common across all industries i.e. communications
• Demand for skills: the frequency that the skill appears in job descriptions
• Supply of skills: the frequency a skill appears across applicant profiles
• Skills gap: the difference between demand for skills and supply of skills

Main findings

• Nursing, finance, accounting and auditing are four of the most in-demand hard skills in the UK workplace.
• Physical therapy is named the most in-demand hard skill in CIMSPA’s Sport and Physical Activity (S&PA) industry.
• The Travel and Tourism industry has the highest number of potential employees with relevant skills in 2022. The industry looks to be in a place to bounce back after redundancies during the pandemic.
• Jobs within the business and accounting industries have been the most in-demand over the last five years, based on the number of job postings.
• The UK workforce has a big gap in skill supply within computing jobs. The supply of various computer programming skills such as JavaScript, SQL, C# and CSS is considerably lower than the demand.
• When analysing job descriptions with industry-specific skill requests, the EMSI data reveals that healthcare employers listed ‘nursing’ as an essential hard skill in 15% (more than 1,000,000) of all industry postings over the past five years. Only 3% of applicants had the skill on their CV or applicant profile.

Another gap in healthcare employee skill sets, based on the data, is professional mental health training. Around 10% of all healthcare jobs stated professional mental health skills were necessary, the specific skill only came up in 4% of all applicant profiles.

The business and accounting industries are also experiencing a gap between skill demand and supply. Industry-specific skills like finance and accounting management, business auditing and forecasting are all experiencing higher employer demand than employee supply.

The data reveals that tourism staff waiting in the wings for jobs to be listed are the most trained staff. There is minimal difference between demand from employers for the majority of industry-specific skills like tourism risk analysis, managing travel discounts and specific consumer travel advice. The most in-demand hard skill in the tourism industry is sales techniques with a 3% difference between demand and supply.

Computer programming skills

There is a big gap in the UK workforce in computer programming languages, not just in the IT industry but across all industries.

In the Computing and IT industries alone, though, the language with the biggest gap is JavaScript with over 17% of all job descriptions in the industries requesting JavaScript as necessary. Surprisingly, only 11% of applicants mention it in their profile.

SQL, C# and CSS – all covering a range of programming needs like design, development and database management – were all in high demand in the UK over the past five years. SQL demanded 17% of potential applicants have knowledge of the language, 12% for C# and 11% CSS.

Highly Demanded Soft Skills

As well as analysing hard skills, the CIMSPA study also looked at softer, easily transferable skills. The most commonly demanded soft skill in the UK is adequate communication, more than 13,000,000 different job descriptions mentioned communication skills are a necessity. Second and third most in-demand soft skills were management and sales with over 9,000,000 and 7,000,000 mentions respectively. Customer service, enthusiasm and attention to detail ranked in the next three places.

Whether 2022 is the year of employment or the year of using the training budget on levelling up and to help aid development, there are always skills to learn to ensure business successes as well as personal growth and development.