The market is cautious but far from cold. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a careful approach to hiring, yet clear demand hotspots emerged for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026. So the picture isn't a slowdown across the board. It's a sharper focus on people who can do specific, high-value work.
The official numbers back this up. In August to October 2025, the largest volume increase in vacancies came in the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, which rose by 5,000 the ONS Vacancies and jobs in the UK bulletin for November 2025. Digital roles also sit among the occupations with the greatest additional employment demand between 2025 and 2030 Skills England's assessment of priority skills to 2030, and demand for key occupations is set to grow by nearly 25% over the next decade, with 1.8 million new priority jobs expected by 2035 a landmark Skills England report.
When agents raise the volume of code, the bottleneck moves. Writing a first draft gets cheaper and faster, so the work that decides quality shifts to reading, reviewing and validating what comes out. That's a judgement skill, not a typing skill. And the market is already leaning hard towards AI: demand for AI skills increased nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK analysis from Accenture reported by The Register.
This is a national priority, not a niche one. During London Tech Week 2025, the UK government announced a partnership to upskill 7.5 million UK workers in essential AI skills by 2030, equivalent to around 20% of the workforce techUK. The route into these roles is broadening too: apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 the DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025. So the talent pool for reviewers and validators is growing from both experienced developers and newer entrants.
Security review deserves its own line. There are roughly 143,000 people in the UK cyber security workforce, with growth accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024 the government's Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 report, yet 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy the AI Labour Market Survey 2025. More machine-written code means more code to check for flaws, so people who can review for security carry real value.
Start by testing the skill that now matters most. Instead of only asking someone to write code from scratch, give them AI-generated code and ask them to review it: find the bug, question the approach, explain what they'd change and why. That surfaces judgement, security awareness and communication in one exercise.
Then widen your definition of a strong hire. With demand for cognitive and higher-order thinking skills rising across digital work the Skills England annual skills report 2026, the developer who reasons well about trade-offs often beats the one who simply codes fastest. Look at apprentices and career changers too, given how quickly that route into AI roles is growing. And move at pace: in a market this competitive for specialist skills, a slow, unclear process loses good people to a quicker one.
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