UK telecoms skills shortage: 200,000 engineers set to leave by 2030

As many as 200,000 UK telecoms engineers are expected to leave the workforce by 2030 against a graduate pipeline of just 14,000 a year, according to a new report from the Digital Connectivity Forum.

The industry body’s Skills and Inclusion Working Group published the findings in Expanding the Network, a study of the barriers to entering the UK telecoms and digital connectivity sector.

The Forum said around 60% of UK telecoms engineers are now over 50 and that the sector faces an estimated 30,000-person engineering shortfall over the next ten years.

The report said recorded telecoms employment fell by approximately 21,000 filled jobs between 2023 and 2024, one of the sharpest drops of any digital subsector. It added that the fall reflects the tail-end of the full-fibre build cycle rather than declining demand for skills.

Full-fibre coverage in the UK rose from 6% of homes in 2018 to 78% in 2025 as operators raced to meet the government’s target of 99% gigabit-capable coverage by 2032.

Openreach alone grew from roughly 33,000 people in 2018-2019 to 37,000 in 2023, including 2,800 newly recruited engineers.

The Forum said build activity is now slowing as operators focus on the remaining harder-to-reach premises, but the networks will still need technical and field-based staff to maintain them. It warned that the fibre build cycle risks masking a deeper skills challenge and a longer-term talent cliff as older engineers retire.

A workforce that does not match the country

Women made up 19% of the UK telecoms workforce in 2020, against 37% globally, placing UK telecoms behind its international peers and most comparator sectors.

The report said the sector is also losing women it has already recruited, with female representation dropping steeply after the age of 35.

Ethnic minority representation among telecoms engineers stands at 11%, the lowest of any IT specialist occupation and below the 15% recorded across the total UK workforce. Black women accounted for only 0.6% of IT specialist roles in 2024.

An awareness problem

The Forum surveyed 74 young people and students, 88 job seekers and seven recruitment professionals for the report. Among the young people, 58% held a positive view of the sector and just 3% a negative one, while 38% described themselves as neutral or unaware.

When asked whether they felt represented in telecoms, 47% of young respondents said they did not know enough about the sector to answer. The report said the sector’s central problem is visibility rather than reputation.

Young people cited a lack of work experience (59%) and a lack of clear information (58%) as the main barriers to entering the sector. Job seekers pointed to being unaware of available roles (43%), location or travel requirements (43%) and concerns about age or background bias (40%).

Automated CV screening emerged as the most frequently raised concern among candidates, with both the over-45 and under-25 samples objecting to the same mechanism.

The report cited research across the US, UK and Germany which found 48% of employers using applicant tracking systems automatically reject candidates for middle-skills roles with a six-month CV gap.

Salary and benefits (69%) and interesting or meaningful work (52%) topped the list of what attracts job seekers to telecoms. Hybrid or remote working (49%) and information on transferable skills (38%) ranked as the support that would most help people enter or stay in the sector.

The roles telecom companies struggle to fill

Recruiters told the Forum that cyber and information security, ESG and sustainability, and legal, policy and regulatory affairs were among the hardest roles to fill. Two of the three were also among the roles candidates least associated with telecoms.

The report said artificial intelligence is reshaping entry-level hiring at the moment the sector most needs to expand it.

UK entry-level and graduate roles have fallen by up to 35% over the past 18 months, and James Reed, Chief Executive of Reed, said his site advertised around 180,000 graduate jobs three or four years ago compared with 55,000 now.

The Forum warned that cutting graduate and apprentice intake in response to short-term AI efficiency gains risks recreating the same skills cliff in ten years’ time.

What the sector is already doing

The report pointed to BT Group as the UK’s leading private-sector apprenticeship employer and to Vorboss, whose apprenticeship partnership with the ITP reached 36% female engineers against an 18% industry average.

It also named Openreach’s civils engineering roles and Cellnex’s inclusive hiring processes as examples of what is already working.

The Forum set out a series of recommendations for employers, including:

• Transparency on how and where AI is used in recruitment, with a commitment to human review through to interview
• Clear, jargon-free job adverts that are kept up to date
• Feedback or an outcome notification for every applicant as standard
• Published pay ranges alongside advertised roles
• Skills-based hiring in place of binary experience requirements
• Visible progression pathways, including role-to-role maps and promotion criteria

For government, the Forum called for a centralised home for telecoms careers information, for telecoms to be reported as a distinct subsector in official digital workforce statistics, and for employer-delivered returnships to qualify for skills funding on the same basis as apprenticeships.

It also asked for AI Skills Boost to set explicit participation targets for workers over 50 and career returners.

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