AI Skills Partnership — UK Government and Industry Coalition Targets 10 Million Workers by 2030

In January 2026 the UK government expanded its AI Skills Partnership, a coalition first announced at London Tech Week 2025 between the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and major technology employers. The partnership's target is to give 10 million UK workers — about a third of the national workforce, including at least 2 million people in small and medium-sized businesses — practical AI skills by 2030.
New funding of £27 million was committed to the TechLocal scheme, part of the wider £187 million TechFirst programme, to help employers create or fill up to 1,000 tech roles in under-served communities, with grants of up to £225,000 per organisation. The AI Skills Boost programme offers 14 industry-developed courses, each completable in around 20 minutes, through a national AI Skills Hub, and the partnership funds up to 100 AI Masters scholarships across nine UK universities. Founding partners include Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, Salesforce and SAS; new partners added in January 2026 include the British Chambers of Commerce, Cisco, Cognizant, the NHS and techUK.
By January 2026 the government reported that around 1 million AI courses had been delivered since the programme's June 2025 launch — a participation figure, not an independently verified learning-outcomes study. No third-party evaluation of skills retention or employment impact had been published as of the announcement, and the programme remains far short of its 2030 target scale.

Read the full analysis: https://www.techuk.org/resource/techuk-proud-to-be-joining-government-and-industry-led-ai-skills-partnership.html