Reducing Costs While Enhancing Capability: Rethinking Talent Strategy in Higher Education

UK higher education is navigating one of the most complex workforce environments in recent memory.  Financial pressures, mounting cost challenges, and uncertainty around student demand are forcing institutions to make difficult decisions about workforce size.  For most, this means a combination of restructures, hiring constraints and redundancies.

At the same time, universities face rising expectations to modernise how they operate: delivering digitally enabled education, strengthening research and innovation, improving student outcomes, meeting sustainability commitments, and responding to rapid technological change.  These priorities all require skills that are evolving faster than traditional workforce models were ever designed to support.

The question HR leaders are grappling with is this: how do we make workforce reductions where needed, while deliberately protecting and building the skills and capacity our institutions will rely on tomorrow?

When workforce change creates capability risk

Workforce reductions are often unavoidable.  But if they are not accompanied by a clear, forward‑looking workforce strategy, they can create structural capability gaps that are hard to recover from.

Pressure points are emerging in areas such as:

• Digital, data and systems capability
• Student experience, analytics, and retention
• Research development, funding and commercialisation
• Estates sustainability and net‑zero delivery
• Cyber security and specialist professional services

Recruiting experienced professionals in these areas is difficult and expensive.  Private‑sector competition is intense, candidate pools are small, and pay flexibility is limited. The result is a widening gap between strategic ambition and workforce capacity.  For many institutions, building capability through recruitment alone is neither realistic nor affordable.

Potential redundancy does not have to mean loss of talent

One of the risks of rapid workforce change is that valuable institutional capability is lost alongside the roles that are redundant.  Many staff affected by restructures bring strong transferable skills, deep organisational knowledge, and a willingness to adapt - but lack clear pathways into emerging roles.

This presents an opportunity for HR teams to rethink how talent is identified and redeployed. Rather than seeing workforce change purely as an exit process, there is growing recognition of the value of:

• Improved understanding of the impact of AI on traditional job roles
• Defining future skills demand in a rapidly changing environment
• Reskilling and upskilling staff into areas of this future demand
• Creating structured transition pathways
• Using assessment to identify potential rather than narrow experience

For institutions under pressure, this can mean building capability and creating practical alternatives to talent loss during workforce change.

Emerging careers and reskilling as strategic levers

Emerging careers programmes - including early-career pipelines, apprenticeships, career-transition routes, and structured upskilling - are often positioned as long-term investments. However, used deliberately, they can also help institutions to swiftly respond to immediate workforce challenges.

When aligned to workforce planning, these approaches can:

• Build critical capability at lower long-term cost
• Reduce reliance on hard‑to‑fill external recruitment
• Support redeployment following restructures
• Widen participation and improve workforce diversity
• Mitigate the cost impact of redundancy programmes
• Reduce over-reliance on high-cost external consultants and interim contractors

Ultimately, they allow institutions to shift focus from “roles we can no longer afford” to “future skills we cannot afford to ignore.”

From hiring gaps to capability planning and creation

Many HR leaders are now reframing workforce questions away from vacancy management and towards long‑term capacity and capability:

• What skills will our institution need in three to five years?
• Which capabilities can realistically be acquired - and which must be created?
• How do we align workforce change with talent development, and quickly?
• What governance and support structures are needed to make reskilling effective?

This capability‑led mindset supports more sustainable decision‑making, particularly in periods of constraint.

A moment for deliberate leadership

The financial pressures facing higher education are significant and immediate.  But the workforce decisions made now will shape institutional resilience for years to come.

HR leaders are uniquely positioned to ensure that periods of change do not erode future capability - but instead become moments of renewal, redesign, and repositioning.

The starting point is to make the “build capability while reducing cost” ambition achievable through creating structured transition pathways, so at-risk staff with high potential transferable skills can move into priority roles through targeted reskilling, alongside future proofing the wider workforce through upskilling programmes, addressing both the changing higher education environment and, more broadly, the evolving world of work as the adoption of AI accelerates.  

A conversation for UHR Annual Conference 2026

The 2026 conference provides a timely forum for HR leaders to translate this challenge into action: building critical capability while reducing cost and harnessing the latent potential that already exists within the higher education workforce.

Together, in our Hays session BA6 11.45am 12^th May, we will share practical approaches to capability mapping, redeployment pathways, and emerging careers, reskilling and upskilling models that can reduce risk and cost while creating opportunity - even in the most challenging environments.

For further information ahead of the conference or a no obligation exploratory discussion with a Hays workforce solutions expert, please contact matthew.lewis@hays.com

Hays

Matt Lewis, Director Hays Workforce Solutions & Advisory