At the start of 2025, Linkedin reported on the fastest growing job roles in Birmingham and the wider UK. In this blog, we delve into those findings and what this could mean for your workforce recruitment.
In January 2025 Linkedin launched it’s annual report on the fastest growing job roles across the UK and its main cities. Why is this important to businesses? Well, it indicates the growth markets for upcoming roles, but also highlights the growth in demand for certain professions. In this blog, we look closer at the top job roles and what this means.
A.I Leads The Way In Job Roles
The UK picture
It is with little surprise to see that role focused on Artificial Intelligence took the top spot in the UK report for top upcoming roles. With AI an ever-growing technology and topic of business interest, many organisations will be looking to ensure they have individuals in their organisation with the skills to leverage this technology and keep up.
What does this mean for Birmingham?
Interestingly though, in the Birmingham top 10, AI wasn’t even mentioned with the role of Sales Development Representative taking the top spot. Suggesting that as a city and region, we’re slightly behind the wider trend of embracing this as a necessary skill set into our roles, or that the industries that dominate the West Midlands haven’t found a way to utilise it yet.
Whilst many people are starting to become skilled in these new areas, to fill these roles. If the jobs in the region aren’t reflecting the same growth UK wide, it could mean many of these skilled people look for opportunities outside of the region.
If businesses invest in roles where there is continued growth across the UK, it not only keeps the business up to date with new technology but allows for a region to retain the talent that is being upskilled in these areas.
Is Birmingham Tech Focused?
As mentioned earlier, the top 10 fastest growing roles in Birmingham are showing a slightly different trend compared to the UK.
It is interesting to see that the only tech related roles to feature are Systems Engineer at number five and Technical Support Engineer at number 10.
Why could this be?
It could indicate that Birmingham and the West Midlands in general is at an early stage in its maturity when embracing technical roles and their application, or that with a larger, more sluggish, traditional manufacturing base the pace of change has taken longer.
This doesn’t mean that Birmingham isn’t developing and investing in the future. According to UKtech news, Birmingham is seen as a significant hub for tech businesses and mentioned that the sector in the West Midlands was named the fastest growing in the UK for two years running.
It’s also clear the region sees the future benefits for business of embracing these new skills. It was announced earlier this year that businesses in the West Midlands will benefit from an AI Innovation Fund worth £7million.
One of the aims being that it will create jobs, though it would be hard to determine what types of jobs these will be and what fraction would be tech sector related. If we go on the assumption of tech related roles, this could shift the fastest growing job roles and potentially see more tech related roles climb up the list for 2026.
The Rise of Human-Centric Roles in a Tech-Driven World
Another interesting find in the UK top growing roles were tour guides, featuring at number 25. What makes this interesting is that in the sea of tech roles, finance and engineering roles, is that even though we as a nation are moving largely towards tech, there is still that demand for more human-to-human interactions.
Could the fatigue of online and constant digital world result in these more human focused types of roles growing?
The UK top growing roles 2026 may end up being an interesting comparison.
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