The latest resource management statistics reveal something professional services firms can no longer ignore: you're leaving £1.5 million on the table every year (per hundred people). The calculation is straightforward mathematics:
For every 100-person firm operating at 68.9% utilisation instead of the optimal 75%, billable hours slip away daily. Industry utilisation rates are declining, dropping from 73.2% in 2021 to 71.4% in 2020 to 68.9% in 2024.
Meanwhile, 83% of accounting and professional services leaders report they can't find the right talent. Over 300,000 accountants have simply left the profession in the past three years. And only 34% of firms consistently deliver projects on time.
But here's the opportunity hidden in these numbers: the firms that solve resource management now will dominate their markets for the next decade. Whilst everyone else scrambles to fill open positions and justify missed deadlines, high-performers are capturing market share through smarter deployment of the resources they already have.
This article breaks down the most critical resource management benchmarks for 2025, what they mean for your firm, and how to turn these statistics into an actionable strategy.
The perfect storm hitting professional services
Let's set the scene properly. Professional services firms face pressure from multiple directions.
Revenue growth across the sector slowed to 4.6% year-over-year in 2024, down from 7.8% in 2023 and well below the 8.7% five-year average. Deal pipelines are shrinking, dropping from 183% to 154% in just a few years. And employee attrition is holding steady at 12.5%, which is actually lower than the 13.8% peak we saw, but still above the five-year average.
Three crises are converging:
- a talent shortage that shows no signs of improvement,
- a technology gap that separates winners from losers,
- and changing workforce expectations that make the old playbook obsolete.
Data shows the problem this causes. Only 34% of projects are delivered on time. Only 34% stay on budget. And only 36% deliver their full intended benefits. And despite the overwhelming need for project management skills, only 45% of organisations provide accredited training to their people.
But here's what makes this moment critical: the gap between high-performers and everyone else is widening all the time. Firms at Level 5 maturity see 739% higher revenue growth, 537% better profit margins, and 71% improvement in billable utilisation compared to Level 1 organisations.
The choice facing firms comes down to marginal survival versus genuine thriving. Your firm will either be in the group that pulls ahead or the group that gets left behind.
So let's dig into what the numbers actually reveal, and more importantly, what you can do about it.
Key takeaways:
The utilisation crisis
- Industry utilisation fell to 68.9% in 2024 (down from 73.2% in 2021)
- Each percentage point below optimal costs a 100-person firm £384,000 annually
- 6% utilisation improvement = £1.5M in incremental revenue
- High-performers maintain 75-80% utilisation through real-time visibility
The talent emergency
- 300,000+ accountants left the profession in the past three years
- The workforce has shrunk by 17% since 2020
- 83% of senior leaders report critical talent shortages (up from 70% in 2022)
- 190,000-200,000 open positions remain unfilled across professional services
The technology divide
- 83% of highest-performing firms use integrated systems
- Yet 42% of average firms are held back by legacy systems
- 47% of project managers lack access to real-time data
- 7.5 hours per week wasted on manual reporting (one full day weekly)
The data trust crisis
- Only 10% of firms wholly trust their resource data
- 58% cite inconsistent data input as the primary problem
- 61% struggle to forecast future resource needs
- Bad data leads to reactive planning, missed opportunities, and burnt-out teams
The AI paradox
- 72% of organisations now use AI in at least one function
- But only 20% of project managers have practical AI experience
- Professional services sector saw the biggest jump in AI adoption
- Only 6% of companies have trained over a quarter of their workforce on AI
The bottom line
- Level 5 maturity firms see 739% higher revenue growth than Level 1 firms
- The difference comes down to systematic investment in resource management
- Firms that act now will capture market share for the next decade
- The cost of standing still has never been higher
The resource utilisation paradox: what the statistics reveal
Let's start with the metric everyone tracks: utilisation rates.
Billable utilisation across professional services organisations fell to 68.9% in 2024. This represents a steady three-year decline from 73.2% in 2021 and 71.4% in 2020.
The industry benchmark for sustainable utilisation sits at 70-75% for most professional services firms. And the optimal range, what some call the "Goldilocks Zone," is 70-80% because it balances high productivity with staff wellbeing and necessary non-billable activities like training and business development.
Push beyond this, and you create different problems. Firms operating at 125% utilisation (essentially overbooking resources) see project delays, quality issues, and burnt-out teams. The recommended rate for successful project delivery hovers around 80%, giving people breathing room for the unexpected whilst still maintaining profitability.
So when the industry average sits at 68.9%, we're looking at a sector-wide problem.
What this actually costs
Let's break down what that utilisation gap means in actual pounds.
For a 100-person firm:
- Current state: 68.9% utilisation
- Optimal target: 75% utilisation
- Gap: 6.1 percentage points
Take 100 people working 1,920 billable hours per year (based on a standard 2,080-hour working year minus holidays and training). That 6.1% gap equals 11,712 hours of billable time slipping away annually. At a conservative £200 per hour average billing rate, you're looking at £2.34 million in lost revenue every single year.
SPI Research data shows that a 6% utilisation improvement for a 100-person firm generates 7,800 additional billable hours per year. At that same £200 hourly rate, we're talking about £1.56 million in incremental revenue without hiring a single additional person.
Now consider what a 10% improvement looks like (which Forrester research shows is achievable with proper resource management tools). For our 150-person audit practice:
- 150 people × 1,920 hours × 10% = 28,800 additional billable hours
- 28,800 hours × £200 = £5.76 million in new revenue annually
This is money currently being left on the table because firms can't see, plan, or optimise their resource deployment effectively.
Why firms are struggling
The utilisation problem is the symptom of deeper operational issues. Case in point, 47% of project managers don't have access to real-time KPIs. They're making resource allocation decisions based on outdated spreadsheets and gut instinct rather than current capacity data. By the time they realise someone's overbooked or underutilised, it's too late to course-correct.
Similarly, resource managers are spending 7.5 hours per week on manual reporting. That's one full day weekly. For a team of 10 resource managers, you're burning 3,900 hours annually (£312,000 at an £80,000 average salary) just on basic admin tasks.
Plus, 42% of firms report being held back by legacy systems that weren't designed for modern resource management challenges. These systems can't handle complex scheduling, don't integrate with other business tools, and certainly can't provide the real-time visibility that effective capacity planning requires.
Perhaps most damning: 50% of project professionals spend over a day manually collating project reports. The irony is that we're so busy reporting on our utilisation that we're actually reducing it through inefficient processes.
The data trust crisis compounds everything. When only 10% of firms wholly trust their resource data, you can't make confident decisions about hiring, training, or strategic investments. You're essentially flying blind.
What high-performers do differently
The firms bucking this trend invest in real-time resource management visibility systems that show current and projected capacity at a glance. They've standardised their resource management processes so data input is consistent and reliable. And they've integrated their resource planning with project management and financial systems so information flows seamlessly.
Take Gerald Edelman, a Top 30 UK accountancy firm. Before implementing modern resource management systems, they struggled with the same challenges: manual processes, limited visibility, and reactive planning. After systematically addressing these issues through better technology and processes, they gained the real-time capacity planning capability that lets them make proactive decisions about resource deployment.
The difference between firms operating at 68.9% and those maintaining 75-80% utilisation lies in the investment in the visibility and tools needed to optimise resource deployment. High-performers can see where capacity constraints will emerge weeks before they hit. They can identify which skills are in high demand and which are underutilised. They can make data-driven decisions about hiring, training, and project acceptance.
And they're capturing the £1.5 million to £5 million in additional revenue that their competitors are leaving on the table.
Talent management statistics: the crisis nobody's talking about
Whilst you're trying to optimise the resources you have, the pipeline of future talent is collapsing.
The exodus
In accounting alone, over 300,000 accountants and auditors left their positions in the past two to three years.
What’s more, the accounting and auditing workforce has shrunk by 17% since 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To put that in perspective, if your firm had 100 qualified accountants in 2020, the equivalent across the industry would be 83 today. Except you can't find those 83 because everyone's competing for the same shrinking pool.
To add to this, 75% of current CPAs are Baby Boomers approaching retirement age. And the AICPA estimates 136,400 annual job openings through 2034 as these experienced professionals leave.
Meanwhile, between 190,000 and 200,000 accounting positions remain unfilled across professional services. Firms are taking four to five weeks on average to fill open roles, and some positions stay vacant for months. Firms that can't match Big Four salaries are hit hardest.
The widening gap
Talent management statistics show the crisis accelerating, not stabilising. 83% of senior financial leaders now report an accounting talent shortage, up from 70% in 2022. That's a 13 percentage point jump in just two years. And 10% say the decline is getting more pronounced.
The pipeline isn't refilling either. The number of accounting graduates with bachelor's or master's degrees dropped 7.4%. (That's the largest single-year decline since 1994-1995). Over the longer term, the total number of accounting graduates has decreased by 20% since 2010.
CPA exam participation has hit its lowest level since 2006. Only 1 in 9 business majors now select accounting, because they can obtain higher starting salaries in technology, finance, and other business disciplines.
The real-world fallout
Major corporations are citing insufficient accounting personnel as a reason for material weaknesses in their internal controls, too. Advance Auto Parts disclosed that turnover in key accounting positions created material weaknesses in its financial reporting controls in 2023, delaying its 10-Q filing. Tupperware Brands faced similar issues in 2024, citing "significant attrition" in its finance and accounting team as the reason for delayed filings and misstated income across multiple years. Their auditor, PwC, resigned. Their CFO left less than a year later.
The share of companies with staffing-related internal control issues has climbed from 30% in 2022 to 34.4% in 2024. That's an upward trend that should concern anyone responsible for financial reporting quality.
What this means for resource management
The bottom line is, you can't hire your way out of this crisis. The talent simply doesn't exist in sufficient numbers, especially at entry and mid-levels.
This makes proper resource management even more critical. When you can't expand your headcount, you must maximise the productivity and satisfaction of the people you have. Every inefficient process, every hour wasted on manual reporting, every misallocated resource becomes more costly.
The firms that will thrive will be those that can:
- Deploy existing talent more strategically through better capacity planning
- Identify and develop internal skills rather than always hiring externally
- Create working environments that retain experienced professionals
- Use technology as a talent multiplier
Skills visibility becomes a competitive advantage too. If you know what capabilities exist across your organisation, you can match people to work they're suited for, reducing both underutilisation and burnout. You can identify internal candidates for promotion before looking externally. And you can make strategic training investments based on actual capability gaps.
The resource management statistics show that high-performing firms have already made this change. They're systematically optimising the deployment of their resources and capturing market share as a result.
Resource planning statistics: the trust crisis
You can't manage what you can't measure. And right now, most firms can't measure accurately.
The trust problem
Only 10% of firms wholly trust their resource data. At the other extreme, 8% don't trust their data at all. They know it's unreliable, but they don't have better alternatives, so they muddle through with spreadsheets.
When asked why they don't trust their resource data, 58% point to inconsistent data input and processes. Different teams use different methodologies. Some people track time daily, others reconstruct it at month-end. Billable versus non-billable definitions vary by department. The result is data that's too inconsistent to be actionable.
25% cite incomplete data sets as their primary issue. Critical information simply isn't captured. Skills data is missing or outdated. Project hours are logged but not categorised properly. Future capacity is anyone's guess because pipeline data doesn't integrate with resource planning.
Another 17% blame data being spread across multiple tools. Time tracking lives in one system, project management in another, and financial data in a third. Nobody has a complete picture because no single system connects everything.
The predictable result: 21% say their forecasting capabilities are simply not effective. They can tell you what happened last month, but they can't reliably predict what will happen next quarter.
The knock-on effects ripple through the organisation. Project managers pad their estimates to account for uncertainty. Resource managers hoard capacity "just in case." Senior leaders make strategic commitments without confidence that delivery is feasible. Everyone operates defensively because the data can't be trusted.
The real cost of bad data
Let's quantify what this data quality crisis actually costs.
Start with the direct labour cost. Resource managers spend 7.5 hours per week on reporting. That's one full day weekly just compiling data, reconciling discrepancies, and trying to create an accurate picture of resource allocation.
For a firm with 10 resource managers:
- 10 people × 7.5 hours per week = 75 hours weekly
- 75 hours × 52 weeks = 3,900 hours annually
- At an £80,000 average salary (£38.46/hour), that's £150,000 in labour costs just on reporting
But that's only the visible cost. The opportunity cost is far larger.
Those 3,900 hours could be spent on strategic capacity planning, identifying skills gaps, optimising resource deployment, or coaching project managers on better utilisation practices. Instead, they're burned on admin tasks that shouldn't require manual effort at all.
The firms that have solved this data quality problem report dramatic improvements. When you can trust your data, forecasting becomes proactive rather than reactive. You can see capacity constraints emerging weeks before they impact delivery. You can make confident commitments to clients. And you can identify which skills are in high demand and which are underutilised.
Most importantly, you reclaim those 7.5 hours per week for value-creating activities rather than data wrangling. Over a year, that's 390 hours per resource manager that could be spent actually managing resources instead of chasing numbers.
Professional services technology statistics: the divide between winners and losers
Here's what separates high-performers from everyone else: they've made peace with the fact that spreadsheets don't scale.
Almost 90% of spreadsheets contain errors. Yet the majority of projects are still run on the back of spreadsheets. When resource planning lives in Excel, you're making decisions on a foundation that's likely to be wrong.
The problem is cultural too. 44% of managers believe project management software is unimportant. They've convinced themselves that spreadsheets are "good enough" or that dedicated software is overkill for their needs.
The spreadsheet approach might work when you have 10 people and 5 projects. It breaks down completely at 50 people and 30 projects. By the time you reach 100+ people juggling dozens of concurrent engagements, it's actively holding you back.
Skills management statistics: the visibility opportunity
You're sitting on your most valuable competitive advantage, but you probably can't find it when you need it.
The current state of skills management
Only 58% of professional services firms currently track skills systematically. That means 42% are operating completely blind to the capabilities they have in-house.
Of those firms that don't track skills, 66% say they want to start. They recognise the problem. They know they're missing opportunities. They just haven't made it a priority yet. Only 14% have no plans to implement skills tracking at all.
Meanwhile, 31% of organisations want to use resource management to solve issues with underutilised teams and skills. But here's the catch: only 58% actually have the data they'd need to identify those issues in the first place.
This creates an absurd situation. You might have someone with advanced data analytics capabilities sitting at 60% utilisation whilst you're turning away analytics projects because "we don't have capacity." The person exists. The capability exists. But because you can't see it, you can't deploy it.
Or you're hiring externally for a senior tax specialist whilst someone in your audit team has exactly those qualifications from their previous role. They'd welcome the variety. You'd save six months of recruitment. But nobody knows the capability exists because it's not tracked.
Why skills data matters more now
87% of companies worldwide face skills gaps or expect them to hit soon, according to McKinsey research.
The pace of change is accelerating too. 54% of employees will require significant reskilling by 2025. That means substantial training investments, time away from billable work, and strategic decisions about which skills to develop internally versus hiring for externally.
You can't make these decisions intelligently without knowing what skills you currently have. When the CFO Pulse Survey 2024 found that 83% of senior leaders report talent shortages, the instinct is to hire. But what if you already have the capability somewhere in your organisation? What if three people each have 70% of the required skills and could be trained up for far less than the cost of a new hire?
Without skills visibility, you'll never know. You'll keep hiring externally whilst internal talent stagnates, underutilised and increasingly disengaged.
What advanced firms are doing
The firms winning the resource management game have implemented comprehensive skills taxonomies that capture the nuanced capabilities across their organisations.
Take a sophisticated approach like Retain's Skills+ feature, which provides access to a 30,000+ skills taxonomy. This means capturing the specific technical competencies (corporate tax, international tax, transfer pricing), industry expertise (financial services, healthcare, manufacturing), regulatory knowledge (SOX compliance, GDPR, sector-specific regulations), software proficiencies, and client management capabilities that make someone effective in specific situations.
With this level of granularity, resource managers can:
↪ Match people to projects with precision: When a client needs someone with cryptocurrency tax experience who can also handle cross-border transactions and has worked in the fintech sector, you can identify the two people in your firm who meet all three criteria rather than just grabbing whoever's available in the tax department.
↪ Identify development opportunities: If your data shows that 40% of upcoming pipeline opportunities require ESG expertise but only 15% of your team has those skills, you know exactly where to invest training budget.
↪ Build strategic career paths: Instead of telling someone "work hard and maybe you'll make partner someday," you can show them exactly which skills they need to develop to move into leadership roles, specialised practices, or client-facing positions.
↪ Make smarter hiring decisions: When you know precisely which skills gaps can't be filled internally, you can write laser-focused job descriptions and assess candidates against specific criteria rather than vague requirements like "5+ years of experience."
↪ Measure training ROI: After sending five people through a course, you can track whether their proficiency scores actually improved and whether they're now being allocated to projects that leverage those capabilities.
The retention connection
There's a powerful secondary benefit to skills visibility that doesn't always show up in resource management statistics but has massive financial impact: retention.
When people feel their capabilities are recognised and utilised, they stay. When they're repeatedly assigned work that doesn't leverage their strengths or develop their skills, they start looking elsewhere.
The accounting talent shortage statistics we covered earlier show 300,000+ people leaving the profession. Many aren't leaving because of compensation. They're leaving because they're burnt out from doing work they find unfulfilling, or because they can't see a clear path to developing the skills they want.
In a market where 83% of leaders report talent shortages, keeping the talented people you already have might be more valuable than any recruitment strategy
AI adoption in resource management: the paradox
Everyone's talking about AI. Almost nobody's actually using it effectively.
The AI adoption numbers
The AI adoption statistics paint a contradictory picture. On one hand, 72% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function. That's a dramatic jump from the roughly 50% adoption rate that held steady for six years prior to generative AI's breakthrough.
But here's where the paradox emerges. In 2025, only 20% of project managers report having extensive or good practical experience with AI tools and technologies. 49% have little to no experience with or understanding of AI in the project management context.
So whilst organisations are adopting AI tools, the actual humans who need to use them effectively aren't ready. The technology is being deployed faster than the capability to leverage it properly.
The professional services opportunity
The professional services sector has seen the biggest jump in AI adoption across all industries tracked by McKinsey's research. This makes sense when you consider what professional services actually sell: expertise, analysis, and intellectual work that AI tools can augment significantly.
What this means for your firm
The AI paradox in resource management creates a clear strategic choice. You can wait until adoption becomes widespread and "safe," by which point your competitors will have captured the benefits and pulled ahead. Or you can move now whilst the technology is still creating competitive separation.
Start with the foundations. Fix your data quality issues first. Implement integrated systems that give AI the complete picture it needs. Train your resource managers on what AI can and can't do so they approach it as a tool rather than a threat.
Then deploy AI incrementally. Begin with skills matching to improve resource allocation. Introduce scheduling optimisation once your team trusts the recommendations. Then build capability through experience rather than trying to transform everything overnight.
Three actions to take this quarter
1. Calculate your true cost
Stop guessing. Run the actual numbers for your firm.
Current utilisation (68.9% industry average) vs optimal (75%) × your headcount × billable hours × billing rate = money left on the table. For a 100-person firm, that 6.1% gap equals £2.34 million annually.
Add the cost of 7.5 hours weekly per resource manager spent on manual reporting. Present the total to leadership. When the cost of poor resource management is quantified, the business case writes itself.
2. Benchmark yourself honestly
Where do you actually sit on the maturity scale? Level 5 firms see 739% higher revenue growth than Level 1 organisations.
Can you see real-time capacity? Trust your data? Forecast 3-6 months out? Know which skills are underutilised? If you answered "no" to most of these, you know where to start.
3. Fix one critical constraint
Don't transform everything at once. Pick your biggest constraint and solve it this quarter.
No real-time visibility? Implement it. Inconsistent data? Standardise processes. Legacy systems holding you back? Build the ROI case using the frameworks in Section 4. One solved constraint beats five half-measures.
Where to start tomorrow
Firms investing in resource management capabilities today will dominate their markets tomorrow. Those that don't will keep wondering why profitability declines despite everyone working harder.
The gap is widening right now. 83% of high-performing firms use integrated systems. 300,000+ accountants have left the profession. Every quarter you wait is another quarter competitors pull ahead.
Calculate your cost of standing still. Benchmark where you actually are. Fix your biggest constraint.
Ready to transform your resource management? Book a demo to see how Retain helps professional services firms optimise utilisation, improve forecasting, and capture the revenue you're currently leaving on the table.
