Briefly: All we appear to listen to about today is how AI goes to go away everybody jobless and the relentless wave of firms laying folks off. However there’s lastly a bit of excellent information to have a good time. Within the UK, tech vacancies have risen 21%, reaching their highest ranges since earlier than the pandemic.
In keeping with new knowledge from Accenture, a world skilled providers firm specializing in IT providers and consulting, the UK’s tech expertise pool has expanded to its highest degree since 2019.
Considerably paradoxically, although AI has already value many individuals their jobs, there was a 200% year-on-year improve in demand for staff with AI expertise throughout UK cities.
Unsurprisingly, London stays the prime location of IT specialists. The capital accounted for almost two-thirds (65%) of the UK’s expertise vacancies and 80% of the demand.
There’s additionally been a big rise within the variety of folks describing themselves as having tech expertise – up 53% yearly. There at the moment are 1.69 million professionals within the nation who report having expertise reminiscent of cyber, knowledge, and robotics. That is particularly excellent news in a market the place some tech specialists are warned their talents have gotten out of date within the face of generative AI.
Persevering with with Gen AI, companies are growing their funding in upskilling employees to make use of the expertise. As soon as once more, London leads the best way on this space, with 58% of companies growing their funding, in comparison with 40% outdoors of town. London-based firms mentioned they might allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this 12 months.
Accenture used knowledge collected from LinkedIn within the first and second week of February 2025, together with a survey of greater than 4,000 folks.
That is the second piece of AI-related constructive information for staff this week. Consultancy agency PwC discovered that inside sectors by which AI can be utilized for sure duties – together with the software program trade – productiveness and wage development have elevated at a sooner fee than others. The caveat was that vacancies in professions which may use AI have been rising at a slower tempo in comparison with different sectors.
Whereas the report is concentrated on the UK jobs market, it is nonetheless a welcome bit of excellent information for anybody apprehensive concerning the AI jobs risk. It comes quickly after Duolingo and Klarna, which had been so-called AI-first firms, each mentioned they had been scaling again their use of the expertise because it couldn’t substitute people.
There are nonetheless loads of warning indicators about AI’s affect. Final month, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, mentioned that it might wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the subsequent 5 years, resulting in unemployment spikes as much as 20%. In the meantime, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his counterpart at Microsoft, Satya Nadella, have each mentioned AI is creating 25-30% of all new code on the firms.
