Tech Job Market – How Is It Doing? (Spoiler: Not Great)

If you’ve been job hunting in tech lately – or trying to hire – you probably already know things aren’t exactly flying. The honest truth is that the UK tech market in 2026 is doing that awkward thing where it’s simultaneously too slow and weirdly competitive, depending on who you are and what you do.

And depending on where you sit in your career, that might be a considerable understatement.

Let’s break it down.

The headlines aren’t lying, but they’re not telling the whole story

Job listings across the UK are sitting well below where they were pre-pandemic – one figure doing the rounds puts it at about 27% below that baseline. Hiring has cooled, budgets have tightened, and a lot of companies that were growing quickly a few years ago are now in “let’s be careful” mode.

The April 2026 employer National Insurance changes didn’t help. When the cost of hiring goes up, companies get more selective. Fewer roles, more hoops to jump through.

And here’s a stat that really puts things in perspective: around 78% of hiring right now is just companies replacing people who’ve left, rather than actual growth. Only about 1 in 5 roles is genuinely new. So a lot of the movement you’re seeing in the market isn’t expansion – it’s the normal churn of people moving on.

AI created new roles – but let’s be honest about what it took with it

Yes, AI-adjacent roles are growing. Hiring for AI-specific positions is growing more than three times faster than the wider average. Data engineering, cloud architecture, MLOps – all doing reasonably well. Good for the people in those roles; they’ve typically worked hard to get there and the pay reflects that.

But the tech market didn’t just quietly add these roles. It’s been quietly removing others at the same time – and the part of the market that’s felt it most acutely is the junior end.

The junior tech job market right now is rough. Companies that were once happy to bring in graduate developers, let them find their feet, and grow them over a few years are increasingly reluctant to do so. Why? Because AI coding tools have reduced the volume of entry-level work that needs doing, and the business case for a junior headcount is harder to make than it used to be. A mid-level engineer with Copilot can output what used to require a small team. That sounds efficient – and it is, in the short term.

But it raises a question that not enough people in leadership seem to be asking.

Where are the seniors going to come from?

Here’s the thing about senior engineers: they were once junior engineers. And before that, they were graduates who got their first break somewhere.

The assumption baked into a lot of current hiring strategy is that there will always be a pool of experienced, senior technical talent to draw from. But experience doesn’t come from nowhere – it comes from years of doing the work, making mistakes, being mentored, and gradually taking on more responsibility.

If companies aren’t hiring juniors now, and the mid-level market is thinning out each year as fewer people make it through that pipeline, then in five to ten years, the industry is going to be staring down a serious problem. The seniors of today will have moved into leadership and management – as they do – and there will be very few people ready to step into their shoes.

And the irony is that those senior engineers are increasingly needed to review and approve AI-generated work. Every sensible voice in the industry agrees that AI output needs human oversight – that a senior developer needs to check what the AI produced, catch the subtle bugs, understand the context, and make the call on whether it’s actually fit for purpose.

So the plan is: rely more heavily on AI, require more senior oversight of that AI, and simultaneously hire fewer of the people who would eventually become those seniors?

We’re not the first to point this out, and we won’t be the last – but it’s a strategy that only really works if you’re not thinking more than two or three years ahead.

What this means if you’re looking for a role right now

If you’re junior: it’s genuinely difficult, and it’s not a reflection of your ability. The market has structurally shifted against entry-level hiring in a way that has very little to do with individual candidates. Keep building, keep making your work visible – open source contributions, side projects, anything that shows what you can do. The companies still hiring at junior level tend to be the ones thinking about the long game, and they’re worth finding.

If you’re mid-level: the market is better, but you’re increasingly being asked to do more. Scope creep is real. Make sure the roles you’re taking reflect that, both in title and in compensation.

If you’re senior: you’re in demand, but you probably already know that. The interesting shift is the expectation that you can translate technical decisions into business language – the “heads-down, don’t talk to me” era of senior engineering is fading fast.

The glass-half-full take (there is one, just about)

Tech is still holding up better than a lot of other sectors. Businesses still need their systems to run, their data to be secure, and their infrastructure to be modern – that doesn’t go away in a downturn.

There are also signs from the US market that hiring picked up in the second half of 2025. The UK tends to follow the US by roughly six months, which could mean a modest improvement as we move through the year.

Nobody’s promising a boom. But a slow, cautious improvement feels plausible – assuming the industry doesn’t sleepwalk into a talent pipeline problem it should absolutely be able to see coming.

If you’re navigating the market – whether you’re hiring or looking – feel free to get in touch. We talk to people across the industry every day and are happy to share what we’re actually seeing on the ground.