Demand is real and it's growing. In 2025 there were 55,000 unfilled long-term vacancies in UK manufacturing, a gap that Make UK – Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report 2025 estimates costs the economy £6bn in lost output every year. That's a lot of unbuilt product and unstarted projects sitting behind hard-to-fill roles.
The pressure isn't easing. Skills England projects that demand for key occupations will grow by nearly 25% over the next decade, with 1.8 million new priority jobs expected by 2035 GOV.UK - Landmark report sets out action to address key skills gaps (Skills England). Many of those sit in engineering and digital, exactly the people who design, install and maintain robotics and automated lines.
The wider labour market is moving in the same direction. ONS vacancy data for November 2025 shows the largest volume increase in vacancies came from the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, up by 5,000 in the August to October period ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025. When funding flows into robotics, hiring follows quickly.
Automation is reshaping the shop floor and the skills behind it. Six in ten manufacturers (59%) cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as the trends changing jobs and skills needs Make UK – 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap. The same report finds 74% expect demand for cognitive and problem-solving skills to increase by 2030.
That points to a clear pattern. Teams need controls and robotics engineers, systems designers and the analysts who connect machines to data. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, some 193,000 workers, are already flagged among the occupations in critical demand, with three of five indicators in critical demand in 2025 Occupations in demand 2025, Explore Education Statistics, GOV.UK.
There's good news on where these people come from. For engineering, 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. Employers are also building talent, not just buying it: apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report.
Start with the work, not the job title. Automation roles blend hardware, software and data, so define the actual problems a hire will solve rather than a long wish list. That matters most where skills are stretched: with entry-level supply tightening, techUK reports Adzuna has seen a 30% drop in UK entry-level postings since ChatGPT launched techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?, so a narrow spec can shrink your pool further.
Move quickly and keep the process short. Confident applicants in scarce fields don't wait around, and every extra week is output you're not producing. Build for the future too. With 74% of manufacturers expecting demand for cognitive skills to rise by 2030, hire people who can learn new systems, not only run today's ones.
And grow your own. The rise of apprenticeships in AI hiring shows employers closing gaps by training talent alongside experienced recruits. A blend of both keeps teams resilient as robotics funding keeps climbing.
This is where we come in. Reed.ai searches a database of 15 million candidates to find the engineers and technical specialists who keep automated lines moving, and we manage recruitment end to end. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Start hiring your next automation engineer today.
