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CIPD Festival of Work: Employers must invest more in skills as workforce pressures grow

Cheesewright argued that organisations face a combination of long-term workforce shortages and technological disruption that cannot be solved through recruitment alone.

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Employers will need to invest more heavily in workforce development and adaptability as artificial intelligence and demographic change reshape the labour market, according to author Tom Cheesewright, speaking at the CIPD Festival of Work 2026.

Addressing delegates at the event, Cheesewright argued that organisations face a combination of long-term workforce shortages and technological disruption that cannot be solved through recruitment alone.

He highlighted demographic change as one of the most significant forces affecting the future of work, warning that the UK’s ageing population will increasingly constrain the supply of labour.

“2026 is the year that the UK’s population pyramid starts to invert. More deaths than births,” he cautioned.

Cheesewright added that employers are unlikely to be able to fill future vacancies solely through traditional education routes.

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He also addressed concerns around artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on employment.

While acknowledging fears that AI is reducing graduate opportunities, he argued the evidence remains mixed.

Cheesewright pointed to research suggesting most organisations have not yet seen significant hiring or productivity impacts from AI, although he noted software development has been an exception due to the ease with which coding tasks can be automated.

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Rather than replacing entire jobs, he suggested AI is more likely to reshape individual tasks within roles.

He explained: “AI cannot do a job. Every job is too complex for a single machine to do.

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“Humans are unbelievably adaptable and flexible. We do multiple roles in the workplace that we don’t even think about consciously most of the time.

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“But can it do a lot of tasks? Yes, it can. It will have an impact.”

Cheesewright argued that employers will need to respond by reversing a long-term decline in workplace training and placing greater emphasis on adaptability.

He argued that organisations need to reverse a long-term decline in workplace training and focus more on developing transferable skills.

He said: “We do not invest enough in our people, full stop. We’ve got to train a workforce to learn.

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“They have to learn to learn and to keep learning.”

According to Cheesewright, employers should place greater emphasis on what he described as the “three Cs” of future employability: curation, creativity and communication.

He said: “We need to teach people creativity, the ability to synthesize something new. And we need to teach communication.

“The ability to sell your ideas to colleagues and customers is increasingly critical.”

Concluding his address, Cheesewright urged organisations to prioritise adaptability over short-term optimisation: “Our organisations need to be more adaptable, even if that makes us less optimal.

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“And our people need to be more adaptable as well.”

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