Demand is climbing fast. More than 1,700 new jobs are being created across the UK defence sector following at least £1.4 billion in foreign direct investment committed since July 2024, according to the government's defence dividend announcement. That investment lands on top of an already large employment base.
The scale is significant. MOD expenditure with industry supported a total of 272,000 direct jobs in 2023/24, an increase of 11% compared to the previous financial year, according to the MOD supported employment estimates for 2023/24. That follows a total of 239,000 MOD-supported UK jobs in 2022/23, an increase of 6% on the previous year, per the 2022/23 estimates. The trend is clear: budgets are growing, and so is the hiring that comes with them.
Recruitment activity backs that up. The defence sector remained an attractive employer, with surveyed recruitment growing by 17.8% in 2022, according to the government's report on the sector's economic contribution. As primes take on larger programmes, they need more people who can build, secure and maintain complex systems.
The squeeze sits where engineering meets cyber. There are approximately 143,000 individuals in the UK cyber security workforce, with growth moderately accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024, according to the Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 report. That pool is growing, but slowly against rising demand.
Employers feel the gap. A comparison in the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 showed 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy. Engineering more broadly tells the same story: 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
There's a retention dynamic too. 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, according to recruitment firm Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, which surveyed over 500 employers and 1,000 candidates. For defence primes, that mobility is both a risk and an opportunity: scarce cyber-cleared engineers move, so the employers who reach them first and hire well tend to win.
Defence roles often need active clearance or the eligibility to gain it. That takes an already small cyber and engineering talent pool and narrows it again. So primes are widening their search: looking across regions, adjacent sectors and people who can be cleared, rather than waiting for a perfect match to appear.
Start with speed and clarity. When 79% of technical professionals plan to move in 2026, per Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, slow processes lose people. Define the role, the clearance requirement and the must-have skills up front, then move quickly once you find a match.
The employers who fill these roles treat hiring as a continuous search, not a one-off advert. They keep talking to the market, build a pipeline before the vacancy opens, and shorten the gap between finding someone and making an offer.
This is exactly the problem we built for. We search a database of 15 million candidates to surface the engineers and cyber specialists you need, then handle recruitment end to end so you can move at the speed the market demands. 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 widening your search for cyber-cleared engineering talent, start a role with Reed.ai today and see who we surface.
