TL;DR: UK job postings are down around 10% against January 2025, but the decline is unevenly spread. Software developer vacancies have risen 14%, concentrated in senior and AI-linked positions, while manufacturing postings sit 58% below their June 2022 level. The figures come from Indeed, shared with Bloomberg.
The pattern inverts what much of the commentary predicted. Software development was the profession most widely expected to be hollowed out by code-generating models, and it did shed roles heavily after 2022. It is now among the few areas hiring again — but at the top of the ladder, for people who can direct the tools rather than compete with them.
Jack Kennedy, a senior economist at Indeed, described a market splitting into two speeds, with demand pooling among experienced staff and in jobs tied directly to AI rather than spreading evenly through a profession.
Where the losses fall
IT and engineering remain close to where they stood a year ago, occupations where automating routine work raises the value of judgement. The declines are elsewhere and they are broad: retail, manufacturing, and white-collar functions such as accounting and marketing have all fallen by double digits, pressured by higher employment costs as well as by automation.
Construction has not recovered either, nor have warehouse stocking or equipment maintenance roles. Youth unemployment has not been this high in more than ten years, which the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has attributed to a “low hire, low fire” economy where employers neither shed staff nor create openings.
Reading it against the adoption data
This sits awkwardly alongside the ONS adoption figures reported in July, which found UK AI adoption at 35% without the job losses many had forecast. Both can hold at once. Aggregate headcount can stay broadly flat while the composition of hiring shifts underneath it — and a market that stops creating entry-level roles does not register as job losses at all. It registers as a cohort that never gets in.
That is the awkward part for policy. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has urged young people towards technical qualifications as career protection, arguing AI may write an essay but cannot build a train. The Indeed data suggests the rungs those qualifications lead to are exactly the ones disappearing.
Looking forward
For UK employers, the practical question is whether the entry-level squeeze is a cyclical response to cost pressure or a structural change in how teams are shaped. If junior roles were partly a training investment that AI now appears to substitute for, the sector will discover within a few years that it has stopped producing the experienced staff it is currently competing over.