I may be causing the job market to splinter.
As companies adopt AI, UK employers are increasingly prioritizing experienced workers with AI skills, raising the bar for early-career professionals, according to new data from Indeed Hiring Lab. The research finds that graduate job postings in the UK have fallen to their lowest share since 2020, even as AI-exposed occupations like software development, IT, and engineering outperform much of the broader labor market.
"The recent rise in software development hiring has focused on senior and AI-specialist roles, suggesting that employers are prioritizing experience and AI fluency over volume hiring of junior talent," Jack Kennedy, senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, told The Deep View. "That makes the skills mix more important than ever."
Overall hiring remains subdued, with U.K. job postings 11% below where they stood at the beginning of 2026. But the slowdown is reversed when AI skills enter the equation.
While hiring remains weak across many white-collar occupations, job postings that explicitly reference AI continue to surge, according to Indeed. Job postings for HR, management, marketing, and finance that mention AI are growing even as overall postings in those fields decline. "We're seeing the relationship between AI exposure and hiring demand has flipped, with occupations most exposed to AI now seeing stronger hiring growth on average," Kennedy said. "This is true not just for software development, but also other AI-exposed occupations."
The data suggests employers are looking to hire for experience and AI fluency. As AI increasingly handles routine coding tasks, Kennedy said companies are placing greater emphasis on prompt engineering, code review, and quality assurance alongside traditional technical expertise.
"For jobseekers, particularly those in the early stages of their career, investing in that skills combination will be the most effective way to adapt to a market that is being rapidly reshaped," Kennedy said. "Demonstrating genuine AI competency alongside strong technical, creative and problem-solving skills is increasingly what separates candidates who progress from those who don't."
Our Deeper View #
Indeed's findings complicate the narrative that AI is coming for jobs. Since the introduction of generative AI, economists and business leaders have speculated that AI will automate the tasks of white-collar workers, rendering many roles obsolete. Software engineers, in particular, have gotten the most heat. While studies do suggest coding roles are highly exposed to automation, that doesn't necessarily mean they're at risk of disappearing. Instead, AI is changing the work itself. For developers, that means spending less time writing code and more time reviewing, polishing, and validating AI-generated outputs. The same dynamic is playing out in fields like marketing and advertising, where professionals increasingly use their expertise to refine AI-generated work rather than create it from scratch. The shift suggests AI literacy is becoming increasingly important for employment. That’s especially true for college graduates entering a labor market where entry-level opportunities appear to be shrinking. Still, it raises questions about the quality of the work itself. Editing AI-generated outputs may not be as satisfying as creating something original, and whether workers will embrace that tradeoff remains an open question.