The market is splitting in two. On one side, demand for specialist AI skills is climbing fast: it rose nearly 200 percent in a single year, with London taking 80 percent of AI-related job postings and close to two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK, according to Accenture figures reported by The Register. On the other, the entry-level door is narrowing. UK tech graduate jobs fell by 46 percent in the past year, with a further 53 percent drop projected, based on Institute of Student Employers data reported by The Register.
That squeeze reaches beyond tech firms. Adzuna has recorded a 30 percent drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, leaving graduates facing the toughest market since 2018, as techUK reports. Yet the wider picture is not one of collapse. The largest volume increase in vacancies between August and October 2025 came from the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, up by 5,000 roles, according to the ONS Vacancies and jobs bulletin for November 2025. Employers are hiring, but they are hiring differently.
As firms move from experimenting with AI to running it in production, the hard question changes. It stops being 'can we build this?' and becomes 'can we trust what it produces?' That is what evaluation roles answer. They test model output for accuracy, safety and bias, design the checks that grade responses, and build the governance that keeps systems accountable. The skills sit alongside a broader demand hotspot. Businesses stayed cautious through 2025, but specialist areas including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security kept pulling, as Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026 describes.
The talent pipeline is also reshaping itself. That matters for evaluation work, which rewards judgement and domain knowledge as much as a computer science degree. Anyone who can assess how safely a system behaves is in short supply.
The critical shortages cluster around the people who design and connect systems. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, a group of around 193,000 workers, are among the occupations in critical demand, with three of five indicators flashing critical in 2025, according to the GOV.UK Occupations in demand 2025 data. These are exactly the profiles that evaluation and governance work draws on: people who understand how a system is meant to behave can tell when it does not.
Sourcing patterns differ by discipline. For engineering roles, the vast majority of new hires come from the resident labour force, showing low reliance on international recruitment, per the Migration Advisory Committee review of professionals in IT and engineering. Top technology firms, meanwhile, can pay sizeable wages to skilled migrants for the rarest capabilities, as the same Migration Advisory Committee analysis notes. The lesson for employers is simple: your hiring strategy has to match the role, because one channel will not cover them all.
Start by defining the judgement you need, not just the tools. An evaluation hire should be able to explain why an AI output is wrong, not only flag that it is. Test for that in interview with real examples from your own systems. Second, widen the pipeline. With apprenticeships now a fifth of AI hires, capability is arriving through routes that a degree filter would miss, so screen for reasoning and domain understanding over pedigree.
Third, move quickly on the scarce profiles. The proportion of employers struggling to fill vacancies has eased overall, yet 70 percent of cyber firms still reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy, according to the AI Labour Market Survey 2025. When the right person surfaces, a slow process loses them. Keep your steps tight, brief interviewers in advance, and give clear feedback fast. Finally, look sideways: analysts, testers and cyber specialists often make strong evaluators, because the core skill is disciplined scepticism applied to systems.
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