Demand for people who can run security operations is climbing, and the pool is not keeping pace. There are approximately 143,000 individuals in the UK cyber security workforce, with growth moderately accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024 the government's Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 report. That faster growth is a good sign, but it tells you the baseline was tight to begin with.
Here's the shift worth watching. As agents take on more of the triage work, infrastructure teams aren't hiring fewer people. They're hiring different people: engineers who can read what an agent recommends, question it, and sign off on the risk. The job is moving from doing the analysis to owning the decision.
Patching is a judgement call, not a checkbox. An agent can scan a fleet, cross-reference known vulnerabilities, and rank what to fix first. But someone has to weigh a critical patch against the risk of breaking a live service, and that someone carries the accountability.
In practice, three roles tend to own this. Infrastructure and platform engineers decide what gets deployed and when. Security engineers set the risk thresholds the agents work within. And a team lead or head of infrastructure holds the final sign-off when a change could take a service down. The workforce that fills these roles sits inside that 143,000-strong cyber security population GOV.UK's 2025 labour market analysis, so competition for people who can do the human part is real.
Hire for judgement first. Technical fluency matters, but the differentiator is someone who can challenge an automated recommendation rather than wave it through. Ask candidates to talk through a patch they chose to delay and why. The reasoning tells you more than the tooling they list.
Move quickly once you find the right person. With the workforce growing only moderately according to the 2025 GOV.UK figures, strong candidates don't stay available for long, so a slow process costs you good people.
This is where we come in. We search 15 million candidates to find the infrastructure and security people who can own the risk call, not just run the tooling. 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. Tell us what your team needs and we'll start building your shortlist today.
