The tech skills UK employers actually want right now
Key Points
- SThree's half year results show employer demand shifting from software development to cloud migration and AI roles
- Energy related engineering was the strongest skill area, with fees up 8% year on year
- Banking and finance placements grew 12% while traditional technology roles fell 14%
- Data security and AI enablement drove 36% growth in Japan, signalling where global demand is heading
Employers are moving their technology hiring budgets away from traditional software development and towards cloud migration, AI and data security roles, according to new half year results from STEM recruiter SThree.
The company, which places skilled workers across 11 countries and generated £147.7 million in net fees in the six months to 31 May 2026, reported a 14% drop in fees from technology placements overall.
SThree said demand for candidate skills has shifted from software development to migrating ERP systems from private to public cloud environments, and to roles across the AI value chain.
The same pattern appeared in Germany, the recruiter’s largest market, where technology fees fell 18% on weak demand for software developers specifically.
In the UK, technology fees dropped 23% as vacancies thinned out, leaving cloud and AI specialists as the candidates most likely to find work in a shrinking market.
Energy stood out as the strongest area of demand anywhere in the business.
Fees from SThree’s energy segment rose 8% year on year, and engineering as a whole held almost flat at just 1% down while every other major skill group declined.
In the USA, the company reported robust demand for engineering and technology workers on projects tied to power generation, grid modernisation, data centre construction and energy infrastructure serving AI applications, driven by rising electricity demand from AI workloads and electric mobility.
Japan offered perhaps the clearest signal of where technology hiring is heading.
SThree’s fees there jumped 36%, with demand strongest for workers in digital transformation, AI enablement and data security as Japanese clients invest heavily in modernising their operations.
Banking and finance roles also bucked the downturn, with fees from that category rising 12% across the group on demand in the USA, Japan and Belgium.
Life sciences placements fell 8%, with the weakness concentrated in Europe, although SThree noted improving demand for life sciences workers in the USA during the second quarter, where permanent placements returned to 10% growth.
The results point to a technology jobs market splitting in two.
Workers with skills in cloud migration, AI, data security and energy infrastructure continue to find employers competing for them, while generalist software developers face the sharpest fall in demand the recruiter has recorded across its European markets.
