It's a market of two halves. Overall hiring stayed cautious through 2025, yet specialist skills kept pulling demand. Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026 describes a subdued economic backdrop where businesses hired carefully, but with clear hotspots for AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security. Those are exactly the areas where quality and behaviour testing matter most.
The wider picture backs this up. ONS vacancy figures for November 2025 show the largest volume increase in vacancies from August to October 2025 came in the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, up by 5,000. So the appetite for skilled technical people is holding, even where general hiring has slowed.
The squeeze is sharpest at the start of careers. techUK, citing Adzuna data reports a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing the toughest market since 2018. The Register, citing the Institute of Student Employers puts a sharper number on the tech sector specifically: graduate jobs fell by 46% in the past year, with a further 53% drop projected. When junior routes narrow, teams lean harder on people who already hold a craft skill like behaviour testing.
AI skills sit at the top. The Register, reporting Accenture data found demand for AI skills rose nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all UK technology vacancies. As more products ship AI features, the need to test how they behave, not just whether they run, grows with them.
Analysis and design roles are under real pressure too. GOV.UK's Occupations in demand 2025 lists IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, around 193,000 workers, among the occupations in critical demand, flagged on three of five indicators. These are the people who translate what a product should do into clear, testable behaviour, so their scarcity raises the value of behaviour-driven work across a team.
Security keeps competing for the same talent. GOV.UK's cyber security skills report for 2025 counts roughly 143,000 people in the UK cyber workforce, with growth accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024, while the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 notes 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy. Meanwhile the DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025 shows apprenticeships rising from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025, a sign that employers are building craft skills in-house rather than only buying them.
Start by treating testing as a craft, not a phase. Write the job around outcomes: someone who can turn a feature request into readable given-when-then scenarios, work with analysts and developers early, and keep tests trustworthy as the product changes. That framing attracts people who care about how software behaves for real users, which is the whole point of behaviour testing.
Speed and clarity win here. When the market for analysts, testers and AI-adjacent skills is this tight, the team that defines the role sharply and responds fast tends to secure the right person first.
We built Reed.ai to make specialist software hiring faster and clearer. We search a database of 15 million people to surface a ranked shortlist for roles like behaviour testers, QA engineers and business analysts, and we manage the process end to end, from matching to booking interviews. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you're building out a testing craft, tell us what good behaviour looks like for your product and we'll start the search today.
