The bottom of the ladder is getting harder to reach. Adzuna has seen a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT's launch, with graduates facing the toughest job market since 2018 techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?. The pressure is sharpest in tech: the UK tech sector cut graduate jobs by 46% in the past year, with a further 53% drop projected, according to figures from the Institute of Student Employers The Register.
Engineering shows the same squeeze on junior roles. Entry-level hiring there has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. When automation absorbs the simple tasks that used to train juniors, the question isn't whether to hire graduates. It's how to make them productive from day one.
The mix of how teams bring new people in is shifting too. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. That tells us employers increasingly want to build skills on the job rather than buy them ready-made, and automation work suits that approach well.
The wider workforce is moving in step. 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 UK workforce techUK. In an automation team, the graduate's job is no longer to hand-build every workflow. It's to design, review and supervise the agents that do.
Pairing works because it splits the workload in a way that teaches. The agent takes the repetitive build, testing and monitoring. The graduate makes the calls the agent can't: what good looks like, when an output is wrong, and where a process needs a human. That's judgment, and judgment is best learned on live tasks, not in a sandbox.
It also solves the training gap that automation creates. When simple tickets vanish, so does the old way juniors earned their stripes. An agent gives a graduate a steady stream of real work to review from the first week, so they build pattern recognition fast. You get useful output early and a stronger engineer later.
Set the agent to draft, and the graduate to approve. Reviewing an agent's output teaches someone to spot edge cases, question assumptions and understand why a workflow behaves the way it does. That's far more valuable than copying boilerplate, and it maps directly to the senior skills you'll want from them in two years.
Hire for curiosity and judgment over a long list of tools. In a role where the agent handles the mechanics, the person who asks sharp questions and spots when something looks off is worth more than the person who memorised a framework. Test for that in interview: give a flawed automation and ask them to find the problem.
Done well, this turns a tough graduate market into an opportunity. You bring in people early, make them productive fast, and grow the oversight skills your automation team will depend on.
When you're ready to hire, we search 15 million candidates to find people with the curiosity and judgment automation teams need, and we manage the process end to end. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell Reed.ai the role, and we'll start building your shortlist today.
