Hiring is cautious, but skilled engineering work is still moving. The Low Pay Commission describes the current labour market as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels Low Pay Commission Report 2025, GOV.UK. That means fewer roles are opening, so each one you advertise matters more.
Engineering feels the squeeze at the start of careers. Government figures show entry-level hiring in engineering has fallen to -19%, while senior hiring sits at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. In plain terms: the pipeline of new machinists and programmers is thinning, so the experienced people you do hire carry more weight.
There is demand pulling the other way too. The defence sector, a heavy user of precision machining, saw surveyed recruitment grow by 17.8% in 2022 Defence sector continues contributing significantly to UK economy - GOV.UK, and MOD expenditure supported 272,000 direct jobs in 2023/24, up 11% on the year before MOD supported employment estimates 2023/24 - GOV.UK. Where there is machining work, there is competition for the people who can programme it well.
A CAM programmer sits between design intent and a finished part. They turn a CAD model into toolpaths that a CNC machine can run safely, quickly and to tolerance. Get it right and you save cycle time, tooling and scrap. Get it wrong and you crash a spindle or bin a batch. The skill is practical, and it is hard to see from a CV.
The talent pool is also mostly domestic. For the engineering profession, the vast majority of new hires come from the resident labour force, showing low reliance on international recruitment GOV.UK - Professionals in IT and engineering. You are largely fishing in a UK pool, and that pool is competitive. Vacancies in professional, scientific and technical activities recently posted the largest volume increase of any sector, up 5,000 ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025, so demand for technical skill is real.
There is a generational shift to plan for as well. Across AI hiring, apprenticeships rose from 3% of hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. Manufacturing employers can borrow the lesson: growing your own machinists through apprenticeships is becoming a practical way to fill roles that experience alone cannot.
Test the thinking, not the buttons. Software fluency in Mastercam, Fusion or NX is useful, but it is not the same as knowing why a roughing pass should leave a specific stock allowance. Set a real problem and watch how the person reasons through it.
A short, paid practical trial beats any interview answer. Let a strong programmer produce a toolpath for a representative part and review it with your shop-floor lead. You will learn more in an hour of real work than in a day of questions.
Move quickly once you find the right person. In a low-hire market, good machinists rarely stay available for long, and a slow process loses them to the defence and aerospace employers hiring hardest. Line up your interviewers, agree your practical test in advance, and be ready to make an offer.
This is where we fit. We search a database of 15 million candidates and rank a shortlist in seconds, so you spend your time assessing real machining skill rather than screening piles of CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell us what your CAM role needs, and we will surface people ready to run it. Start hiring today with Reed.ai.
