There's a shift happening in the tech labour market that feels rational in the short term but risky in the long term.
At Kainos, we are choosing a different path. We continue to invest in early careers, deliberately shaping the journey from school leaver to engineers contributing to production, building skills that last a lifetime. We have seen first-hand how sustained investment in junior talent fuels long-term growth, while also creating meaningful social impact across the regions we operate in.
Hiring has slowed. That's expected. What's different this time is where the cuts are landing. Entry-level roles have been hit hardest, while demand stays concentrated at senior levels. [nfer.ac.uk]
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We've seen versions of this before, when hiring contracts sharply, early-career intake is usually the first thing cut and the last thing restored and the cost doesn't show up on the balance sheet that year. It shows up later, in the experienced engineers who never came through.
On the surface, the logic holds. When pressure rises, organisations optimise for immediate productivity. They hire experience, reduce training overhead, and increasingly lean on AI to fill the gaps. But this isn't only cost control, it's a decision about how our industry sustains itself.
The data across the UK and US tech market is increasingly consistent:
It isn't. The system is already under strain.
This is not a market with surplus talent. It's a system already running close to its limits — and reducing the intake into it doesn't stabilise it. It increases fragility.
AI is often cast as the counterbalance, and in some ways it is. It reduces the need for routine, entry-level tasks; boilerplate code, data preparation, simple analysis. But those tasks were also how engineers learned. They built intuition through repetition, developed judgement through failure, and came to understand systems by working through their edge cases.
When those tasks disappear, the learning pathway doesn't automatically evolve to replace them. Left alone, it simply breaks.
It's worth taking the strongest counter-argument seriously: perhaps AI means we genuinely need far fewer junior engineers, permanently. I don't think the evidence supports that. The work juniors grow into– judgement and system design; based on a solid understanding of technology – is rising in value, not falling. The risk isn't that we need fewer engineers. It's that we invest less in how engineers become experienced, while still expecting the same outcomes at scale.
The impact of reducing junior hiring isn't immediate. In the short term, almost nothing appears to change. Delivery continues, experienced hires cover the critical roles, and AI lifts throughput.
But the effects accumulate:
And before those timelines fully materialise, the pressure starts to show up inside organisations:
By the time it's visible, it's a systemic constraint and when every organisation optimises the same way at once, the pattern is predictable: a workforce that skews too senior, a shrinking pool of promotable talent, rising competition for experienced engineers, and rising long-term cost to hire and retain them.
Skills gaps form when many reasonable decisions are made in parallel, rather than from one bad one.
Entry-level roles should evolve. But removing them altogether isn't a strategy, rather the absence of one. The organisations that navigate this well will be more deliberate:
At Kainos, we've always invested in early careers. Our entry-level academy pairs an intensive four-month training programme with a year of structured learning alongside real project delivery. By aligning that model to how engineering is changing in an AI-enabled world, our early-career engineers contribute from day one on delivery and, just as importantly, act as a catalyst for capability-building across the organisation, spreading new tools and ways of working through the projects they touch. In the year ahead, we’ll add circa 200 early careers to our workforce in Kainos. This sustained approach to early careers has led to a retention level in the 90s across the organsation, shaping not just our talent profile, but the culture that’s embedded across the organisation.
It takes more intent. It is far less costly than rebuilding a pipeline that's been allowed to collapse.
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Talent pipelines run on a different timescale to market cycles. The choices we make now will shape the availability, capability and cost of engineering talent for the next decade. If we keep reducing junior intake without redesigning how engineers actually develop, we aren't simply responding to today's conditions.
We're setting the conditions for the next skills gap and those gaps are slow to emerge, but even slower to close.
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