Workday's 2025 Global Workforce Report reveals the biggest challenge isn't finding new talent, but unlocking the potential within your existing workforce.
In this article we cover:
The UK faces a persistent productivity puzzle. Despite a dynamic job market, economic growth has remained stubbornly flat. Business leaders are rightly focused on navigating uncertainty, but what if the most powerful lever for growth isn't out there in the market, but already inside our organisations?
At Workday, we’ve just launched our 2025 Global Workforce Report, and the findings offer a crucial perspective on what’s really happening in the UK economy. By analysing anonymised behavioural data from our global customer base—including over 220 million transactions—we’ve uncovered a significant disconnect between hiring activity and an organisation’s ability to use the talent it already has.
The message from the data is clear: the biggest challenge isn't finding new people. It's understanding, developing, and mobilising the skilled individuals already on your payroll.
Our report found that companies with strong internal mobility have 19% lower attrition among their top performers. That’s a powerful and direct link between talent agility and retention.
In my conversations with CEOs, CHROs, and CFOs across the country, a common theme emerges. They express frustration, knowing their businesses are filled with talented, skilled people. Yet, they lack the visibility or the systems to move that talent to where it’s needed most.
When we delved into our proprietary workforce data, we found this story playing out on a global scale. Three insights stood out:
Attrition is rising, especially in companies with low internal mobility. If people don’t see a clear path forward where they are, they will find one elsewhere.
Promotion rates have dropped across most sectors. This not only stalls individual careers but also signals to employees that the organisation is not invested in their growth.
Nearly half of all employee comments on AI strategy carried a negative tone. The reasons cited were poor communication, an uneven rollout, or the perception of added pressure without clear benefits.
Taken together, these trends paint a picture of misalignment. Talent isn't flowing, people feel stuck, and the transformative promise of AI is being undermined by a lack of clarity and purpose.
Here in the UK, the first half of 2025 has been active. Our data shows:
Job requisitions were up by 8%
Job offers increased by 10%
Applications surged by 34%, totalling over 13 million
On the surface, this looks like a healthy, bustling market. But it begs the question: are organisations converting this activity into long-term success? Are they truly putting the right people into the right roles?
This is where the cracks begin to show. Many UK leaders tell us they lack a systematic way to match skills to roles or to identify internal candidates before spending time and money on external searches. The data validates their concerns. Our report found that companies with strong internal mobility have 19% lower attrition among their top performers. That’s a powerful and direct link between talent agility and retention.
The UK government estimates that the digital skills gap costs the economy £63 billion a year. But our findings suggest the issue runs deeper than a simple lack of skills. It’s a problem of visibility and connection.
Too often, business leaders don’t have ready answers to fundamental questions:
What skills currently exist within our business?
What new roles could our people be redeployed into with the right support?
How do we identify and retain our high-performers before they even start looking elsewhere?
This is the problem of misalignment. Talent exists, but it remains invisible, disconnected, and unactivated. The result is misused potential, wasted time, and missed opportunities. If rolled out poorly, AI can compound the issue. AI tools can free up an employee's time from administrative tasks, but without a system to redirect that newfound capacity toward high-value work, it simply evaporates.
So, how do we fix this? One of our customers, Rolls-Royce, provides a brilliant example of what’s possible when you tackle these challenges head-on.
Rolls-Royce is on a journey to becoming a skills-based organisation. This means moving away from rigid job descriptions and siloed data towards building a dynamic, real-time picture of its workforce.
This transformation has allowed it to:
Identify hidden talent across the organisation
Empower underrepresented groups to progress based on skills, not just tenure
Dramatically improve workforce planning and strategic decision-making
This brings us back to the national picture. The UK is sitting on enormous human potential, but we have lacked the infrastructure—the systems, data, and mindset—to unlock it.
A skills-based approach to workforce planning, powered by responsible AI, is one of the highest-leverage moves a business can make today. It’s not about adding more software; it’s about making smarter use of the talent you already have.
Based on research we conducted last year, we estimate that large UK enterprises could unlock up to £119 billion in additional productive capacity every year through the large-scale deployment of AI. This isn’t about job replacement. It's about removing friction and giving your people the tools and time to focus on the high-impact, strategic work that drives your business forward.
The path to renewed productivity doesn't lie in simply hiring more people. It lies in building a more agile, visible, and connected workforce.
Interested in learning more? Explore these findings in full by downloading Workday's 2025 Global Workforce Report.
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