State of the Tech Workforce UK

CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce UK provides an in-depth look at employment, economic impact, technology trends, salaries, hiring activity and more across the regions and metropolitan areas of the United Kingdom. The report draws upon a number of data sources including EMSI Burning Glass, UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), Eurostat, OECD, CompTIA and more.

Net tech employment in the United Kingdom reached an estimated 1,978,041 workers in 2021. Net tech employment is projected to increase by almost 1% in 2022.  Since 2016, net tech employment increased by an estimated 62,140 net-new jobs. Net tech employment growth has been steady during this span, averaging approximately 10,356 new jobs per year. See full report PDF for details.

The top four metropolitan areas employ a little more than 572,500 tech industry and tech occupation workers, or about 1 in 3 tech workers in the nation. At more than 8%, London and Edinburgh have the highest concentration of net tech employment as a percentage of the overall employment base. Compared to the national tech employment concentration benchmark of 6.3%, six metro areas had a higher rate, confirming the importance of technology to a far-reaching set of cities across the UK.

Among the components of net tech employment, the tech sector side of the equation stayed practically the same, while the occupation side across all industry sectors experienced a gain of 0.3% year over year. Looking ahead, tech sector and tech occupation gains are projected to be 0.9% and 0.7% respectively.

Employer job posting data provides another layer of insight into the tech job market outlook. Overall quarterly tech job postings among U.K. employers dipped during 2020 due to the pandemic slowdown. Postings rebounded in Q1 2021 and have kept the upward trend with employers playing catch-up with pent-up demand.

Employer demand for tech talent as measured by online job postings follows a similar pattern to tech employment. Manchester had approximately 45,543 postings in 2021. In second place is London with approximately 32,111 postings. Bristol and Birmingham are third and fourth respectively in terms of tech job postings.

Read more about IT Workforce.