It's a market of two speeds. Overall recruitment is cautious: the wider labour market is described as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels Low Pay Commission Report 2025, GOV.UK. Yet demand for the right software skills is very much alive.
The professional, scientific and technical activities sector saw the largest volume increase in vacancies over August to October 2025, up by 5,000 ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025. Against a subdued economic backdrop, businesses stayed careful but demand held up for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly (tech recruitment outlook 2026). In short: fewer roles overall, but sharper competition for people who can do the specialist work.
AI is the standout. Demand for AI skills increased by nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all UK technology vacancies The Register (Accenture data). That concentration matters when you're building a team outside the capital and competing for the same people.
Digital and engineering occupations appear most commonly among priority occupations, many already seeing high recruitment demand and expected to keep growing strongly GOV.UK - Skills England annual skills report 2026. The routes into these teams are 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, a sign that employers are growing skills as well as buying them in.
There's a caution here. UK tech cut graduate jobs by 46% in the past year, with a further 53% drop projected The Register, and Adzuna has recorded a 30% drop in entry-level postings since ChatGPT launched techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?. Cutting the junior pipeline now can leave a mid-level gap in a few years, so plan your team shape with that in mind.
Start with the work, not the job title. Developer experience is about how quickly and happily your engineers ship good software, so define the specific problems a new hire will solve before you write a spec. With demand concentrated in AI, data and cyber, being precise about the skills you need helps you compete for scarce people Computer Weekly (tech recruitment outlook 2026).
Balance your seniority mix. Entry-level hiring has fallen further than senior hiring across technical fields; in engineering, entry-level sits at -19% against -10% for senior, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. Growing your own talent through apprenticeships is now a mainstream route, not a fringe one GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report.
Look close to home. 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. And move quickly when you find the right person: in a market this competitive, a slow, clunky hiring process is itself a poor developer experience that costs you offers.
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