TL;DR

Some 15% of UK STEM employees told a YouGov poll for recruiter SThree that they had seen colleagues leave because AI had made their jobs unrecognisable, IT Brief UK reported on 4 November. Almost half, 45%, say their employer has struggled to replace departing specialists. These are perceptions from a firm that sells STEM recruitment, but they point to a retention cost that job-loss headlines tend to miss.

The poll covered 885 UK employees in science, engineering and technology roles, part of a wider STEM Workforce Report from SThree spanning five countries, with fieldwork between 10 July and 1 September. Respondents also cited other AI-linked reasons for colleagues going: 14% pointed to lost career progression and 12% to unmanageable workloads.

Too fast, and shifting work upwards

Over a third, 37%, think their organisation is bringing in AI and similar technologies too quickly to weigh the effect on people’s roles. A further finding bears on training: 29% believe senior staff are now doing work that once went to juniors, as entry-level jobs change shape.

Rakesh Patel, who runs SThree in the UK, frames this as a challenge for some employers and an opening for others, because “experienced specialists” are “seeking out new roles”. That is also the commercial interest of a recruiter, and the release-based coverage carries no independent comment.

What the numbers can and cannot show

A figure for people who have seen a colleague leave is not a measure of how many have left. Several respondents may be describing the same departure, and the reasons are their own reading of why someone went. We read the sample size against SThree’s own report, but did not find the 15% figure in the part of that report we could access, so it rests on IT Brief’s account.

In our view, the 29% figure deserves the closest attention from UK employers. If work is moving up the ladder, junior staff lose the tasks that used to train them, and the skills gap arrives years later. It echoes questions raised in a BBC report on graduate AI roles, and sits alongside Adzuna’s figures on graduate vacancies, which we reported in October.

For technical teams, a practical response is cheap: ask leavers and those who stay whether AI changed the job, and record the answer. Firms could collect better evidence from their own exit interviews than from any recruiter’s poll.