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A third of creative industry employers recruiting in the past two years struggled to fill vacancies

ended 15. June 2026

50% of creative industry employers are looking to expand their workforce in the next three to five years but a third of creative employers recruiting in the past two years had struggled to fill vacancies, due to candidates lacking the right skills.

Research from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre shows creative industries are struggling to hire because of a skills gap, and unable to train up their own people due to constraints like cost and time.

Additionally, over a third of the creative industry workforce are self-employed, freelancers and microbusinesses - more than double other sectors. In these situations, the cost of training and upskilling falls to the individual - and where cost is a barrier, the skills gap further widens, and creates a privilege gap, where those who can afford to freelance or invest in their own learning win the work, and those who cannot afford it, will further lose out.

Questions for the Newspage community:

  • Should employers be expecting talent to arrive with the skills, or invest more in training existing and new employees to develop those skills?
  • What policy changes can be made to make upskilling more affordable for small businesses and employers to close the skills gap?
  • What can be done to support those without an employer to invest in their own training and development, so they're able to find work?

Responses by Monday.

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Matthew Knight
Chief Freelance Officer at Freelancing.Support
This is a gap that has been created by employers. Rather than expecting people to walk through the door with the skills, we need to return to investing in people's careers, to ensure the future of the creative industry. But policy and investment in talent must consider the entire workforce - not just employees. More than a third of the creative workforce are self-employed, and without making training and development affordable through industry initiatives and tax breaks, we risk losing any sort of competitive edge globally.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
The creative skills gap story is awkward because the industry spent two years acting as if taste, judgement and cultural instinct were optional.

AI can produce quickly, but the “intangible” bit in creative work is judgement built over years: knowing what feels cheap, what feels true, what will land, what will make people wince, laugh, buy, share or switch off.

So yes, employers should train people. But they also need to stop pretending experienced creatives became obsolete the moment a chatbot could one-shot 40 social media infographics. Many talented designers have been thrown under the bus, only to be summoned back when the output started looking like beige slop.

If creative thinking is supposedly the skill AI cannot replicate, it is bizarre to assume people with a decade of it cannot adapt to new work situations. Maybe some do not want to babysit machines. Maybe they want the chance to do the work they were good at before everyone decided “content” was a volume game.
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Austyn Johnson
Founder at Mortgages For Actors
I work primarily with people in this industry and can quite honestly say, if they were paid a bit better, they would get more interest. There is also quite a gap in the need to the people who can help due to the lack of ways to get contacted about new work. A lot of, if not most freelancers work from referral, so if they have not yet had a good chance to build up their contacts, then they wont hear of new opportunities. The creative industry doesnt need to train everyone, there are so many people out there with the skills, they just need a bigger megaphone. Plus, maybe offer some longer contracts, how many people enjoy the open ended stuff anyway?
As with everything nowadays, there are subscription based lead services, but there should be more of an open approoach to all the creative freelancers out there who really want to work, but dont get as much as they want. Maybe its a business I should consider starting! A way of putting people together for free. 'Plenty Of Freelancers'