More than a third of UK organisations say technology skills gaps cost them at least £380,000 over the past year, according to Pluralsight’s annual Tech Skills Report, published Friday and based on a survey of 500 UK tech, IT and learning leaders. Thirty-five per cent of all respondents put the damage at that level or worse. Among businesses earning £73 million or more, 57 per cent did, and 15 per cent reported losses of £760,000 or higher.
Cybersecurity is the worst corner of the problem. Forty-one per cent of security professionals said their organisation’s skills gap cost at least £380,000, and Pluralsight’s principal security author, Matthew Lloyd Davies, explained why the numbers run ahead of other functions: “Cybersecurity skills gaps are particularly costly because they lengthen the window attackers stay undetected, and cost scales with that window. The longer the window is open, the greater the financial impact as costs quickly spread from business interruption to recruiting external specialists.”
The report follows government research published this week finding that 57 per cent of businesses had a basic technical cyber security skills gap, up from 49 per cent a year earlier. In February the government committed £80 million to expand student places in subjects including cyber security, a sum that will take years to convert into working engineers. The near-term reality for CISOs is the one Pluralsight documents: 40 per cent of organisations have unexpectedly outsourced or hired outside talent to rescue key projects, 39 per cent failed to deliver a key project outright, 30 per cent blew their budgets, and 27 per cent lost a client or contract.
The AI picture inside the same dataset is more interesting than either the hype or the panic. Ninety-four per cent of organisations have bought AI tools for at least some staff, yet only 48 per cent say most or all of their people are AI literate, and just 6 per cent report literacy across the entire workforce. Meanwhile 57 per cent say adopting AI has increased demand for AI, machine learning and data science skills rather than reduced it, and 26 per cent think new technical skills now go obsolete within twelve months. Buying the tool has become trivial. Building the capability around it is where the £380,000 lives.
There is an entry-level twist worth noting. Despite fears that AI will hollow out junior roles, 85 per cent of UK organisations hired the same number or more junior tech staff this year, and 10 per cent hired significantly more. Yet 88 per cent worry there is not enough junior talent coming through to fill gaps AI cannot solve. Pluralsight’s author fellow Faye Ellis pointed at the pipeline: the ONS estimates 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training in April to June 2026, 13 per cent of that cohort. Employers, she argues, cannot recruit their way out of this and must build development pathways instead.
Fifty-three per cent of senior leaders say they do not know how to solve their skills gaps. Forty-six per cent of tech workers say they have no time for training. Twenty-eight per cent of learning leaders blame leadership for not supporting upskilling. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and at current costs, self-financing too.
