Does the Tech Industry Really Have a Skills Gap?

Quick Summary

• Why the technology skills shortage is really a mismatch between available talent, experience and increasingly specialist business needs.
• How demanding job requirements can make it harder for capable people to gain the experience employers are looking for.
• Why AI could remove some of the traditional entry level work that helps junior tech professionals build their careers.
• Why organisations need to decide which technology skills genuinely belong in house and which can be accessed through trusted partners.
• How a blended approach to people, AI, specialist expertise and external support can turn a skills shortage into a more practical skills strategy.

Technology has a skills problem. At least, that is what business has been telling us for a few years now. 

Cloud specialisations are becoming increasingly complex as platforms and architectures evolve, cyber security expertise has to keep pace with a threat landscape that refuses to stand still, data centre skills are becoming increasingly important, and Artificial Intelligence is creating demand for capabilities and roles that barely existed a few years ago. 

Meanwhile, experienced and highly skilled tech professionals are applying for hundreds of jobs, graduates are struggling to secure their first opportunity, and capable people are finding themselves out of work. 

So, what is going on? 

As of today, UK IT and tech job postings remain substantial, although they are well below their pre-pandemic peak. Analysis of the latest ONS occupation-level data indicates that approximately 48,500 new core-tech job adverts were posted online in May 2026. 

The problem, then, is not simply a shortage of jobs or a shortage of people. It appears to be a mismatch between the talent available, the experience employers demand and the increasingly specialist capabilities organisations need. 

Organisations are on a wild-tech-goose-chase 

Technology has always moved quickly, but the breadth of capability now expected from IT teams is exceptional. 

Cloud, cyber security, networking, automation, data, AI and infrastructure may all require specialist knowledge. But increasingly, those disciplines don’t exist in isolation. 

An Azure specialist, for example, may also need to understand networking, identity, security, governance, cost optimisation and how everything integrates with a complex mix of cloud, SaaS and existing on-premises infrastructure. 

That is an entire career’s worth of accumulated experience. 

Yet job descriptions routinely ask for these types of combinations – often alongside previous experience within the same sector – using the same technologies, at a similar scale. 

We understand why. Technology is critical, budgets are tight and few organisations feel able to carry people while they learn on the job. 

But when employers require experience while fewer are prepared to provide the opportunity through which it is gained, the problem becomes self-perpetuating. Sometimes organisations are effectively searching for someone who doesn’t exist or who already has a job. 

It’s a Schrödinger-esque employee: ones that must have years of experience, but employees are unwilling or unable to grant those experience opportunities. 

AI is changing the first rung of the ladder 

AI adds another complication. 

Demand for specialist AI skills in the UK rose significantly during 2025, while the wider hiring market weakened and graduate job postings fell to their lowest level since 2020. 

At the same time, AI can now perform some of the routine research, testing, coding, documentation and administration traditionally given to people near the beginning of their careers. 

That creates efficiencies, but there’s a longer-term question we shouldn’t ignore. 

Junior employees become experienced professionals by investigating straightforward problems, observing experienced colleagues, making mistakes in controlled environments and gradually taking on more responsibility. 

If we automate too much of that work without creating alternative routes to experience, where do tomorrow’s senior engineers, architects and IT leaders come from? 

The skills we need are changing 

The technology industry talks extensively about upskilling, but keeping pace isn’t simply a matter of completing another online course. 

Products change, threats evolve, cloud platforms expand, AI introduces new capabilities and risks, and infrastructure requirements shift. While certifications and training matter enormously, they cannot replace exposure to real projects, and they can’t keep pace with how quickly the landscape is shifting. 

This is where the idea of a single, universal “tech skills shortage” starts to fall apart. 

There are areas of genuine pressure, including cyber security, cloud engineering, networking, data, automation and AI governance. Growth in AI infrastructure is also increasing demand for more ‘hands-on’ workers, like electrical, mechanical, power, and data centre cooling expertise. 

But organisations don’t necessarily need all those capabilities all of the time. 

A business might need a migration specialist intensively for six months, a security architect during the design of a project, engineers across several countries for a rollout, and then a completely different blend of skills to support the resulting environment. 

Trying to recruit and permanently retain every possible specialist isn’t practical or affordable for most organisations. 

Sometimes the skills problem is a resourcing model problem. 

Not every skill needs to sit in-house 

Organisations need to continue developing their own people, protecting routes into the industry and looking beyond candidates who tick every box on a job description. AI should be used to help people become more productive and capable, rather than simply removing the opportunities through which junior staff develop. 

But businesses can also be smarter about distinguishing between the capabilities they genuinely need to retain internally and those they need to be able to access quickly. 

For some, that means developing and retaining a substantial in-house technology team. For others, it means combining a smaller internal function with specialist partners, project resources and managed services. For most, it will be a mixture of both. 

This is where an external technology partner should earn their place, by extending, rather than replacing, an internal IT team. 

That might mean providing specialist knowledge for a complex migration, additional engineers during a rollout, cyber security expertise when the threat landscape changes, or access to vendor and technology specialists without the organisation having to permanently recruit every capability itself. 

It should also mean knowledge transfer. Specialist expertise brought into a project shouldn’t simply disappear when the project ends. 

The best external support should leave an internal team stronger, not more dependent. 

Turning a skills shortage into a skills strategy 

Perhaps we need to stop talking about the technology skills shortage as though there simply aren’t enough people. 

There are experienced professionals looking for opportunities and enough people trying to enter the industry. There are also talented internal IT teams being asked to master an extraordinary and constantly changing range of technologies. 

The answer isn’t simply to hire more people, outsource everything or wait for AI to solve the problem. It is a blended approach that combines the best of all worlds into a proper IT strategy. 

• Develop the people you have.  
• Give new talent opportunities to gain experience; this short-term cost will pay off. 
• Use AI where it genuinely makes teams better.  
• Be realistic about which capabilities need to exist permanently in-house. 
• Use trusted partners to bring in specialist skills, experience and capacity when they’re needed. 

The technology skills are out there. The challenge is making sure organisations can access the right ones, at the right time, while continuing to build the expertise they’ll need tomorrow. 

If you are looking for an experienced, reliable partner to support your tech stack. Look no further than Trustco. Since 1998, we’ve been helping customers deliver projects with complex needs and requirements. Speak to an advisor today.