07.10.2025
Skills Adjacency doesn’t chase unicorns. It looks at the adjacent capabilities your workforce already has; the near-miss candidates, the parallel industries, the underutilised professionals, and retools them for the roles you need to fill. Fast.
Industries are evolving at an unprecedented speed. Technology is accelerating. Demands on infrastructure, energy, and defence are intensifying. And yet, one question continues to frustrate leaders across every sector: Why do skills gaps persist?
Despite decades of conversation and countless initiatives, the challenge is not only unresolved, it’s growing fast. From spiralling recruitment costs to persistent talent shortages, organisations are finding it harder than ever to secure the people they need, let alone keep them.
At Morson, we work where the stakes are highest. And what we’ve found is clear: traditional hiring models aren’t moving fast enough. Today’s challenges demand sharper solutions, smarter approaches, and a completely new mindset about what capability really looks like.
The story is in the data
The latest Employer Skills Survey from the Department for Education paints a stark picture:
- Almost one-third of all vacancies in the UK remain unfilled due to skills shortages.
- According to the Open University’s Business Barometer, 68% of employers say they struggle to find candidates with the right skills.
- The same report estimates that the UK skills gap is costing the economy £4.4 billion annually, through increased recruitment spend, temporary staffing, inflated salaries, and lost productivity.
This is not just a short-term recruitment issue – it’s a systemic capability crisis.
What’s the cause?
Several converging forces are accelerating the crisis:
- Demographic shifts: The retirement of the Baby Boomer generation and a surge in early retirements post-COVID has created a significant exodus of experienced professionals across engineering, energy, defence, and other critical sectors.
- Post-Brexit talent drain: The reduced inflow of skilled workers from the EU has further squeezed supply, compounding existing shortages.
- The pace of technological change: Automation, AI, and digital transformation are shifting the skills landscape faster than organisations can react. Skills frameworks are becoming outdated faster than they can be updated.
- Lagging training pipelines: While early careers initiatives are vital, they offer a long-term solution to an urgent problem. The skills being cultivated today won’t mature fast enough to replace the experience that’s being lost now.
It’s no longer viable to simply throw more money at the problem. The “unicorn” candidate, the one that’s experienced, available, affordable, is increasingly a myth. Even unlimited recruitment budgets can’t conjure talent that simply no longer exists.
Skills Adjacency: the new solution for skills gaps
That’s where Skills Adjacency comes in.
At Morson, we’ve engineered a data-led, agile approach to workforce transformation. It’s one that identifies untapped potential, accelerates upskilling, and turns complexity into opportunity.
Skills Adjacency provides a tailored approach to identifying candidates that can fill your skills gaps quickly, and add value to high performing teams. Our innovative Skills Adjacency model gives you complete clarity on what to expect, how much it will cost and how soon we can deliver the required outcome.
Skills Adjacency looks at the adjacent capabilities your workforce already has; the near-miss candidates, the parallel industries, the underutilised professionals, and retools them for the roles you need to fill. Fast.
It’s a model that will enable you to tackle your immediate skills gap challenges and build skills adjacency into a sustainable people strategy, with the flexibility to adapt your requirements as your needs change and the potential to develop an entirely new culture around the question of skills.
This model helps organisations:
- Unlock hidden talent pools
- Reduce time-to-productivity
- Lower recruitment costs
- Increase agility in workforce planning
Most importantly, it’s a mindset shift, from rigid hiring criteria to dynamic capability mapping. From reactive hiring to proactive talent development. From static job titles to fluid skillsets.
In a world where skills needs are changing faster than ever, adaptability is everything. Organisations that succeed in the next decade won’t be those with the biggest recruitment budgets, rather they’ll be the ones that think differently about talent.
At Morson, we’re helping clients redefine how they build capability. Not by chasing what’s missing, but by unlocking what’s already there.
Because at the sharp end, there’s no time to stand still.
