UK tech job openings climb 21% to pre-pandemic highs • The Register
UK tech vacancies are up by 21 percent to hit their highest levels since before the pandemic, according to research from Accenture.
… regions outside of London will also need to compete for talent and infrastructure
The global consultancy found a surge in demand for AI skills, which increased nearly 200 percent in a year. London accounted for 80 percent of AI-related job postings across the UK, while nearly two-thirds of technology vacancies as a whole were in London.
Accenture collected data from LinkedIn in the first and second week of February 2025, and supplemented the results with a survey of more than 4,000 respondents conducted by research firm YouGov between July and August 2024.
The research found a 53 percent annual increase in those describing themselves as having tech skills, amounting to 1.69 million people reporting skills in disciplines including cyber, data, and robotics.
Accenture tech lead Emma Kendrew commented: “The UK has a golden opportunity to establish itself as a global AI leader, and London is at the epicenter. The UK is seeing hotspots of tech talent emerge which we expect to grow as AI is more widely adopted.
“However, to fully capitalize on the economic potential of AI, regions outside of London will also need to compete for talent and infrastructure to achieve sustainable growth and unlock opportunities. The disparity in regional upskilling in AI raises concerns about a growing digital divide in the UK and could hurt long-term competitiveness.”
The research found that London-based companies said they would allocate a fifth of their tech budgets to AI this year, compared to 13 percent who said the same and were based in North East England, Scotland, and Wales.
Earlier this week, research by rival consultancy PwC found that sectors where AI can be readily used for some tasks – including the software industry – are achieving higher productivity and wage growth than others.
Growth in revenue per employee increased during the period when LLMs emerged, from 7 percent annually between 2018 and 2022 to 27 percent between 2018 and 2024. Meanwhile, growth in the same measure fell slightly in industries less affected by AI, such as mining and hospitality, the researchers said. ®
