In-Demand Digital Skills in the UK

The Skills England projection covers 30 priority digital and technology occupations and excludes replacement demand. It is uncertain, so use it to plan which skills your team may need as the product grows.

The national forecast cannot tell you whether your next hire should fix a fragile deployment process or build a reporting pipeline. Use the capabilities below to identify the work delaying delivery, then compare the cost of a hire with training your existing team.

A job description can list many languages and still leave candidates guessing about the work. Describe the first change you need someone to make. Making a checkout accessible needs different experience from planning a database migration.

Give candidates a small piece of existing code to discuss and improve. Include an invalid input or a failing test, then ask why they chose their fix. You learn how they handle maintenance and code they did not write.

A reporting backlog and a machine-learning project need different hires. If two dashboards disagree about revenue, start with definitions, data ownership and the pipeline feeding them. A new model will inherit the same confusion.

For a practical assessment, use a small dataset with missing values and inconsistent records. Ask the candidate to explain their assumptions and show how they would check the result next week, when the inputs have changed. Listen for what they would investigate before trusting the number.

DSIT’s 2025 study estimates that 49% of UK businesses had a basic technical cyber security skills gap. The measure covers confidence in essential tasks that have not been outsourced. It does not measure open security vacancies.

You can check security judgement in a general engineering interview without turning it into a specialist exam. Use a leaked test credential as the starting point. Ask what the candidate would contain first, who they would tell and what they would check before restoring access.

Ask a candidate to sketch how a deployment reaches users, how the team spots a failure and how it returns to a working version. Follow one dependency through the sketch and ask what happens if it stops responding.

Agree on-call duties before interviews. Someone who can implement a service may still need support leading an incident, and that changes who should assess them and what support you must provide.

Skills England describes a shift towards oversight, assurance and judgement as AI changes digital work. Its assessment also makes clear that the effects on employment remain uncertain.

Using an AI assistant to draft code is different from building an AI feature for customers. For the latter, ask how a candidate would test wrong answers, protect sensitive inputs and decide when a result needs human review. A working demo gives you a starting point; the release decision needs evidence.

Let candidates disclose AI help in a work sample, then ask them to explain and change the output. Set the same rules for everyone so you can assess their reasoning fairly.

Put the first outcome, the essential skills and the person reviewing the work on one page. Leave room for tools an experienced engineer can learn. If nobody in the team can review the proposed work, resolve that gap before opening the role.

You may need training for an existing colleague, a permanent hire or additional engineering capacity. Compare the onboarding and management each option needs. An external engineer still needs access to the codebase and someone who can explain why the product works the way it does.

Prioritise software maintenance, data pipelines, cyber security controls and cloud deployment skills for a product team. Skills England’s assessment points to demand across digital occupations, but your hiring order should follow the work holding up delivery. Ask your technical lead to name the gap, the work a hire would take on and who will review it. That gives you a brief you can compare with the cost and time needed to train someone already on the team.

No, projected growth does not tell you how many jobs are open now. It estimates future employment under stated assumptions, so it cannot show how hard your specific role will be to fill. Before approving a recruitment budget, compare current adverts for similar work with the responses your own team receives. Check the location, pay and scope together; a national forecast cannot explain why candidates decline your particular offer.

No, each developer’s AI skills should match the work you expect them to own. Using an assistant to draft code calls for checks on the output and care with data, while building an AI feature also needs a way to test wrong answers before customers see them. Ask your technical lead which of those tasks is in the role. Hire a specialist when the work needs that depth, and agree who can review their decisions.

Use a small work sample drawn from the role, followed by a discussion of the candidate’s decisions. A bug fix can show how someone tests a change, while a failed deployment can reveal how they reason about recovery. Agree the criteria with your technical lead before interviews and use them for each candidate. Keep the task short enough to respect their time, and ask what support they would need to do similar work in your team.