Indeed: UK software vacancies rise 14% as hiring slips 10%

A number worth staring at from Indeed's latest UK vacancy data, reported by Bloomberg: software developer job postings are up 14%, at the same time that overall British vacancies sit about 10% below where they were in January 2025. Two lines moving in opposite directions in the same labour market is unusual enough to be worth explaining.

The explanation Indeed offers is that most of the software rise is concentrated in senior roles and roles directly linked to AI, not spread evenly across the profession. Jack Kennedy, a senior economist at Indeed, framed it as a two-speed market where 'demand is concentrating around experienced workers and roles directly connected to AI, rather than flowing evenly through the profession.' The counterpart to that concentration is severe: manufacturing postings are down 58% since June 2022 and 18% below last summer, while accounting and marketing vacancies have fallen by double digits, as Fortune's write-up notes.

Why this matters if you are running or looking for a job in UK tech: the graduate route into engineering is precisely the part of the market that is thinning. Kennedy's own line to jobseekers was that 'the bar is therefore rising as the stronger areas of the market increasingly require either specialist AI capability or substantial experience.' In practice that pushes early-career workers, career changers and people returning from a break into a narrower door at the same time that senior AI-fluent engineers get bid up.

The honest caveats: this is one board's postings data, not headcount, and a rise in vacancies for AI-linked senior roles does not tell you how many of those postings are genuinely new work versus backfills relabelled to match the moment. The reporting also does not break out how much of the wider 10% decline is AI-driven versus a broader UK cost squeeze that would have happened regardless.

Where it points is still fairly clear: the near-term winners are experienced engineers who can credibly say they have shipped with AI in production, and employers who can either grow those people internally or pay the market rate for them.