Prioritising skill development would enable organisations to remain adaptable in a rapidly changing labour market, and author and consultant Tom Cheesewright has said.

He urged employers to invest in their workers’ training to keep up in a rapidly changing world of work.

Speaking at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Festival of Work, he warned that employers were facing “enormous long-term pressure” on their supply of people.

Noting that employers have a responsibility to “reverse the training decline”, he pointed to research showing that employer spending on training dropped by 27 per cent per employee between 2011 and 2023, with the average number of days spent on training having fallen by 19 per cent in the same period.

Cheesewright advised employers to focus on training their employees on the ‘three Cs’ to ensure they can adapt to the future.

The first, he said, is curation, which he explained was about “learning what you don’t know, understanding the gaps in your skills and actively pursuing the answers”.

He said employees also needed to be trained on creativity, which he argued was the “foundation of value in all our organisations”.

Contrary to common perceptions, the expert said the skills of creativity “can be taught, they can be learned, they can be increased”.

Communication, he said, is also a skill that is important in every role and is becoming increasingly valuable for organisations.