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HR Magazine looking for comment on new data

ended 11. November 2025

With the ONS data showing 5% unemployment in mind, PwC has new data being released tomorrow that shows older workers risk falling behind peers in the skills race, as younger employees are nearly twice as likely to be upskilling in today’s workforce.

Would anyone be willing to offer a fresh quote for HR magazine of around 150 words?

Their angle is: 

  • In a hiring-shy business climate, how can HR support the upskilling of existing staff? 
  • What can employers/HR do to ensure growth within the organisations own talent?
  • PwC data suggests that younger employees are nearly twice as likely to upskill. So, should HR have a separate/specific upskilling plan for older workers?

Please provide a quote around those questions.

Responses by 4pm please.

 

4 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Kate Underwood
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
HR isn’t the hire-and-fire department, it’s the growth engine. In a hiring-shy market, your best hire is the person already on your payroll. Use regular appraisals that ask three things: what the business needs, what the person wants to learn, and what support will make it happen. Capture it in a simple plan and review quarterly. If big pay rises are not possible, add value with mentoring, apprenticeships, shadowing, stretch projects, and bite-size learning. Put learning time on the rota so it happens. Support older workers with new tools and confidence, and use reverse mentoring so skills flow both ways. SMEs are niche; losing one key person costs more than investing in growth. Outsourced HR gives structure, legal confidence, and momentum. It turns good intentions into action. HR is not a luxury. It is a necessity for small businesses and strengthens the bottom line.
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Charlotte Yallop
Partner, Employment Law & HR; Head of Wellbeing and Sustainability at W Legal
Hiring is on pause; capability can’t be. Make upskilling BAU with three levers: Time (one protected hour a week), Targets (learning tied to a live business problem), and Transitions (short, skills-based postings and clear internal moves). Hold managers to coaching and redeployment metrics. Fund micro-credentials, but insist on a deliverable so learning converts to value. Grow from within via a skills marketplace, reverse mentoring and 30-day sprints that turn learners into contributors. Wellbeing is infrastructure: schedule learning in low-demand windows. On age, assume capability and remove barriers: offer digital-confidence sprints, mixed-age cohorts and mid-career reviews that map experience to new tech. Where older staff are under-represented, lawful positive action can widen participation without excluding others. Not a siloed ‘older worker plan’, but universal design with targeted support, the fairest, most effective route to retention and performance.
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Susan Heaton-Wright
Managing Director at SuperStar Communicator
Create a culture of learning where it is the norm to be curious, to evolve with change and to be developing your skillset. Instead of developing the myth that training and development is for those who are under performing, reframe this as an opportunity for everyone in the organisation to develop their skills to benefit the organisation. Instead of dismissing older workers' skills that they aren't digitally and tech savvy, ensure they know there is a lot they offer the company and their role would be made even better through specific skills training. In the end, talent leaves an organisation when they are not valued; they aren't motivated or believe there is no role for them. Save money and motivate staff by giving htem the opportunities to develop their skills.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Older workers have a bright future in AI-enabled businesses because they hold the broad context, ethics and lived experience that agentic AI still can’t muster accurately or consistently.

HR can support that by pairing younger, digitally fluent staff to shadow and capture this expertise in action so nothing valuable is lost.

Someone with process skills and systems thinking can translate that crucial on-the-job knowledge into usable AI training data, and that deep insight powers the intelligence of their current business in tomorrow’s tools. That strategy provides the competitive advantage moat businesses need.

Ethically, the question isn’t who learns fastest, it’s whose wisdom shapes what we teach the machines the fastest, and that is a human–computer interaction process.