23/01/2025

The scale of the skills shortages across the UK continues to grow in 2025. This shortage of experienced workers to choose from is exacerbated for small businesses that do not have the resource or reach of larger businesses to compete for talent.
In this blog post we explore why a skills crisis is developing and how smart businesses, that employ less than 100 people, can change tack to navigate their way through to a prosperous future…
The Current Landscape: A Shrinking Talent Pool
The UK workforce is undergoing significant changes. Recent data reveals that a substantial number of people have taken early retirement, with over 200,000 expected job losses in 2025. Additionally, many working-age individuals are not actively seeking employment, further shrinking the available talent pool. The situation is intensified by a limited influx of skilled workers from the EU, making it increasingly difficult for small businesses to find candidates with the necessary experience to help them deliver great products and services.
Growing Your Own Talent: The New Imperative
Given these challenges, small businesses must shift their focus from searching for ready-made talent to cultivating it internally. This approach involves investing in people with potential and running apprenticeships and aspiring talent programmes, such as industry placements, to turn that potential into productivity.
Yes, of course, this takes time and effort, but the investment has to happen now to nurture the rewards as soon as possible. It’s like the old saying goes, ‘the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time is now’.

There is support to get it right
Setting up an apprenticeship programme and identifying people that have the raw attributes to succeed isn’t easy to get right. Large businesses have learning and development teams that understand apprenticeships and how they can be tailored to their organisation as well as the structure in place to support line managers to nurture talent.
However, smaller businesses can create the same conditions by outsourcing these functions to a team of experts like Supplytrain CIC.
Supplytrain acts as a bridge between employment and education. We help businesses recruit raw talent and put the building blocks in place to develop people that fit your business as a fraction of the cost of hiring an internal team.
An example of our service
Amax Fire and Security Ltd, is a fast-growing, independent security systems business in Harrow, England. Amax outsources its apprenticeship recruitment, employment and pastoral support to Supplytrain.
Tejas Mehta from Amax says “It’s been great working with Supplytrain. They recruit the staff we’re looking for, find the right training provider to deliver the off-the-job training the business needs and take care of all the government paperwork. They even employ the apprentices on our behalf, taking the legal responsibility for the new recruits too.
“It is a unique service that I’d recommend other small and medium size businesses enquire about if you want to kickstart a talent pipeline.”

Contact Supplytrain to see how we can help you kickstart your talent pipeline today!
Contact Supplytrain CIC today to discuss how we can help you design a talent pipeline that attracts and retains motivated individuals. Let’s work together to create the conditions that will encourage good applicants and ensure their success once they’ve started.

We are a social enterprise that helps employers to create fairer routes into work.
Contact us
- Email: [email protected]
Call: 020 3855 6029
Email us about our employer solutions:
Our policies: Data protection / Safeguarding / Privacy

