TL;DR

Adzuna told Bloomberg that the number of UK entry-level adverts asking about AI is close to three times its level at the start of 2025, in a report published on 5 November. Over the same period, junior vacancies on the site fell by a quarter. Taken together, the figures suggest young applicants face fewer openings with a higher bar, although Indeed’s economist cautions that the new demand is narrow.

What the platforms show

The surge is mostly established jobs picking up a new requirement, in sales, software engineering and assistant work, rather than new jobs. Indeed separately finds AI mentioned in one in six entry-level vacancies across exposed fields such as banking, legal and software, twice the share of a year ago.

Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter was blunt. Without AI skills, he said, an office-based job seeker faces a climate “even worse than during the Great Financial Crisis”. That is a recruitment platform’s characterisation, and it is worth reading with Indeed’s more measured view: senior economist Jack Kennedy says the demand comes largely from a few big employers, partly in data centre and AI training roles, and has replaced only a third of entry-level postings lost elsewhere.

The skills bar may also be lower than the rhetoric implies. Most of these jobs, Bloomberg reports, ask only for basics such as prompting ChatGPT and using AI with standard office software.

What employers want

Some firms describe a changed job rather than a vanished one. Harvey Nash’s Simon Crichton talks of juniors handling “the last 20% of the task”. At THG Ingenuity, chief technology officer Jo Drake is rebuilding starter roles around reviewing agent output, arguing that this “man-marking of the agents” is useful education.

These examples come from people with a stake in hiring and AI, and neither offers outcome data. Our recent coverage has tracked the same pressure: graduate vacancies at a decade low on Adzuna, and employers split on whether AI roles still teach trade skills.

Looking Forward

Bloomberg says almost 1 million people aged 16 to 24 are not working or in education or training, adding pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to expand AI training. The government ran an “AI bootcamp” in north-west England in August, though nothing in the report suggests the scale yet matches the problem. In our view, the risk Hunter names at the end deserves as much attention as the headline: skills valued this month may not last until spring, so training programmes built around particular tools could date quickly.