The picture is cautious but far from flat. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a careful approach to hiring, yet clear demand hotspots held firm for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026. In other words, employers are spending less on generalists and more on scarce, high-impact capability.
The scarcity is real at the top of the stack. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, a group numbering 193,000 workers, sit among the occupations in critical demand, with three of five indicators flagged critical in 2025 the Occupations in demand 2025 data on GOV.UK. These are exactly the people who shape how software gets built, so competition for them is fierce.
And the market they sit in keeps growing. The updated Digital and Technology sector definition now contains 107,082 companies, representing 5.2% of all companies in the UK GOV.UK's Digital and Technologies sector economic statistics. More firms building software means more teams asking the same question: how do we keep our best engineers happy and productive?
Because engineers are ready to move. A striking 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, based on a survey of over 500 employers and 1,000 candidates Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, reported by Engineering and Technology Jobs. When churn risk is that high, the quality of an engineer's working day stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a retention lever.
Developer experience, often shortened to DevEx, covers the friction in an engineer's daily work: build times, deployment pipelines, documentation, local setup, onboarding and the tooling that either speeds them up or slows them down. Reducing that friction keeps people productive and, crucially, keeps them. That is why the work is being pulled out of general platform and tooling teams and given its own named owner.
The context supports the shift. The Digital Sector Employment estimates measure the number of filled jobs across the UK digital sector, with the latest figures covering April 2023 to March 2024 DSIT's Digital Sector Economic Estimates on GOV.UK. A large, settled workforce means the next gains come less from hiring more people and more from helping the people you have do their best work.
Start by defining the problem, not the title. A strong developer experience hire owns outcomes like faster onboarding, shorter build and deploy cycles and cleaner internal tooling. Write the role around those measurable results so applicants self-select on the work, not the buzzword.
Look for a blend that is rare on purpose. You want someone who codes credibly, thinks like a product manager about internal users, and listens like a researcher. Ask candidates to walk through a time they removed friction for other engineers and what changed as a result. The best answers come with before-and-after numbers and a clear view of trade-offs.
Speed matters because the same scarcity that makes these roles valuable also makes them slow to fill. A tidy, fast process signals a team that respects an engineer's time, which is the whole point of the role you are hiring for.
We built Reed.ai to close that gap end to end. We search a database of 15 million candidates, surface a ranked shortlist, and manage the process through to a booked interview, so you can act while the strongest engineers are still available. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Start your developer experience search with us today.
