It's tighter than the headlines suggest. The wider UK picture is what analysts now call a 'low hire, low fire' market, with weaker recruitment and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels Low Pay Commission Report 2025, GOV.UK. But that cool surface hides a stubborn shortage in exactly the skills brownfield sites need.
In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, costing the economy £6bn in lost output every year Make UK – Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025. So the demand is real and expensive. The problem isn't volume of applicants. It's finding people who can hold responsibility for automation and AI running on old plant.
That gap is widening because the work itself is changing. Six in ten manufacturers (59%) cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as trends reshaping jobs and skills, and 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to rise by 2030 Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. Oversight of AI agents is one of those higher-order skills, and it's arriving on the shop floor now.
Brownfield sites bring a specific challenge: you're layering new automation and AI agents onto equipment that was never designed for them. That calls for people who understand both the legacy control systems and the software supervising them. The critical roles cluster around control engineering, systems integration and the judgement to know when an agent is wrong.
Systems roles are already in short supply. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, a workforce of around 193,000, are among the occupations in critical demand, flagged on three of five indicators in 2025 Occupations in demand 2025, Explore Education Statistics, GOV.UK. These are the people who connect old plant to new agents and keep the interfaces safe.
Security sits alongside them. Connecting brownfield equipment to networked agents widens the attack surface, and the UK cyber security workforce, roughly 143,000 people, is growing only modestly, from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024 Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 - GOV.UK. OT security is scarce, and it's now part of the oversight picture, not a separate box.
The talent competition is fierce too. Demand for AI skills rose nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related postings The Register (Accenture data). Regional brownfield sites are competing with the capital for the same scarce people, so a clear, fast hiring process matters more than ever.
Start by writing the role around accountability, not tools. An agent-oversight hire needs to interpret what an AI system is doing on live equipment, spot when it drifts and step in with authority. Screen for judgement and domain knowledge of your process, then for familiarity with the specific automation stack. The order matters.
Don't ignore the entry-level pipeline, because it's under pressure. Adzuna recorded a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?, and UK tech graduate roles fell 46% in a year The Register. If you cut junior roles now, you starve your future oversight bench. Grow-your-own is a route back in: apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report.
Move quickly, because good people don't wait. Vacancies in professional, scientific and technical activities rose by 5,000 in August to October 2025, the largest volume increase of any sector ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025. When your competitors are hiring the same profile, a slow process loses the hire. Define the role tightly, shortlist fast and give a clear answer within days.
The right partner makes specialist hiring like this faster and simpler. A recruitment agent can search 15 million candidates, rank a shortlist in under 30 seconds and manage recruitment end to end, from matching to booking interviews, so your OT leads stay on the plant rather than sifting CVs. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. The value is in finding the right person for a role this important, and managing the whole process for you. Tell us what your brownfield site needs and let us surface people who can own agent oversight.
