Our analysis of 700 FTSE 100 annual reports finds skills and training are often missing from the boardroom’s top priorities in the face of technology growth, yet technical reskilling and upskilling are on the rise in the wider workforce.
Most of the UK’s largest listed companies are underprioritising skills development in relation to technology, according to new Multiverse analysis of a sample of FTSE 100 annual reports spanning the last 10 years.
Despite seven in ten FTSE 100 companies mentioning a strategic priority relating to technology, only 7% describe skills and training as a strategic priority in their latest annual reports. This proportion has not improved since 2013 (6%), while technology has shot up, suggesting that boardrooms are not yet recognising the sweeping impact of technology on workforce skills and people requirements.
With Goldman Sachs predicting(opens new window) that AI investment will rocket to $200bn this year, companies who do not act are potentially putting record levels of investment at risk.
To uncover this data, Multiverse’s data science team worked with expert data analyst David Abelman (ex-Meta, Bain & Company), to build a Large Language Model (LLM) system to analyse structured information from over 100,000 pages of publicly available annual reports. The resulting Boardroom Skills Agenda report provides empirical evidence on how people and skills are missing from the boardroom’s top priority list.
The missing skills piece
Where companies do proactively reference skills strategies, they are often not undertaking reviews of the existing skills capabilities of their workforce. Only 17% describe running skills reviews of their workforces in the latest reports, while 78% of companies reference reviewing their Board of Directors’ skills.
According to the report, companies are also not targeting skills development relating to the most consequential technologies that will shape the future of work. For example, while 97% of companies mention critical compliance and DEI training, only 34% of companies referenced Artificial Intelligence (AI) training.
These findings follow Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reporting(opens new window), which confirms that the average number of days of workplace training received each year has fallen over the last decade. Employer spending on training has decreased over the same period, and there has been a fall in both public and private investment in training.
Meanwhile, growth is top of the UK’s political and economic agenda, with the Government promising(opens new window) to break down the current barriers to equipping the workforce with the right skills to maximise new technologies.
Euan Blair, CEO of Multiverse, said:
“Annual reports are a weathervane for the issues that are capturing the boardroom’s attention. What we can see in the data is that investment in technology is skyrocketing but skills and training has stagnated. It’s telling that at the same time, so has UK productivity.
“Technology tools are only as powerful as the people who use them. Without prioritising people, companies will be left with tech strategies that are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The tech revolution will not arrive until companies connect the dots between tools and talent.”
Further headline findings from the Boardroom Skills Agenda report include:
Technology is impacting workforce skills, despite absence from boardroom top priority list
The growing impact of technology on the workforce is starting to be signalled in some reports, with discussion of “reskilling” and technical “upskilling” on the rise. Yet overall the incidence and prioritisation of technical skills initiatives is notably still low.
- The proportion of companies mentioning reskilling has nearly tripled in the last 10 years from 7% to 20%, while technical upskilling has more than doubled (23% to 51%).
- Yet in the most recent set of annual reports, only 10% of companies provided a sum for how much they were investing in training.
- When referenced, the average (median) spend was £600 per employee. A median of just 0.16% of company revenue was spent on training, and only 1% of working hours.
Apprenticeships overtake graduate schemes
The AI analysis also found that companies are delivering training via a number of different schemes, and referencing these schemes more than they were 10 years ago:
- 59% of companies referenced an apprenticeship scheme (vs 48% 10 years ago), while 48% have a graduate scheme (vs 39% 10 years ago).
- Meanwhile, 32% said they had an internship scheme (vs 19% 10 years ago).
David Abelman, Data Science Consultant, added:
“When implemented carefully, LLMs provide a fantastic way to extract quantitative information from textual documents at scale. We were able to craft a workflow to make sense of over 100,000 pages of annual reports, giving us a unique understanding of how companies discuss their people development in relation to their increasingly strategic prioritisation of technology.
“It was clear that whilst technological focus has ramped up, strategic skill development is generally lagging behind. But it’s also promising to see signals of change in the tactical implementation of learning and development initiatives. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in the coming years as the increasing impact of AI is felt.”
Download the full report.
