Briefly: All we appear to listen to about nowadays is how AI goes to depart everybody jobless and the relentless wave of firms laying folks off. However there’s lastly a bit of excellent information to have fun. Within the UK, tech vacancies have risen 21%, reaching their highest ranges since earlier than the pandemic.
In accordance with new knowledge from Accenture, a worldwide skilled companies firm specializing in IT companies and consulting, the UK’s tech expertise pool has expanded to its highest degree since 2019.
Considerably satirically, regardless that AI has already price many individuals their jobs, there was a 200% year-on-year improve in demand for employees with AI abilities throughout UK cities.
Unsurprisingly, London stays the prime location of IT consultants. The capital accounted for practically two-thirds (65%) of the UK’s know-how vacancies and 80% of the demand.
There’s additionally been a major rise within the variety of folks describing themselves as having tech abilities – up 53% yearly. There at the moment are 1.69 million professionals within the nation who report having abilities comparable to cyber, knowledge, and robotics. That is particularly excellent news in a market the place some tech consultants are warned their talents have gotten out of date within the face of generative AI.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 know-how. As soon as once more, London leads the way in which on this space, with 58% of companies growing their funding, in comparison with 40% outdoors of the town. London-based firms stated they might allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this yr.
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 employees this week. Consultancy agency PwC discovered that inside sectors through which AI can be utilized for sure duties – together with the software program trade – productiveness and wage progress have elevated at a sooner price 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 targeted on the UK jobs market, it is nonetheless a welcome bit of excellent information for anybody fearful concerning the AI jobs risk. It comes quickly after Duolingo and Klarna, which had been so-called AI-first firms, each stated they had been scaling again their use of the know-how because it couldn’t substitute people.
There are nonetheless loads of warning indicators about AI’s influence. Final month, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, stated 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 stated AI is creating 25-30% of all new code on the firms.
