Employers' expectations of tech newcomers are changing faster than the routes that give them experience, the new jobs plan says. If you hire into data, digital or AI roles, it asks something of you.
The Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan: What It Asks of Employers
By James Cotton · Last updated · Sources checked · 11 min read
Part of our topic guides on Data & AI Apprenticeships and AI Skills for Business.
By James Cotton, Founder, iO-Sphere
How binding the plan's ask is
The Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan is a policy paper published on 21 October 2026 by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), one of the Industrial Strategy Jobs Plans.
Its ask is addressed to "Every employer, public or private". DCMS's sign-up guidance, Joining the TechFirst community, puts it to "every tech employer", and admits any organisation that "employs digital and technology talent, in any sector".
The plan sets no number for any employer and creates no legal duty. It asks for "one specific, measurable commitment over a stated period", which the guidance calls "a single, voluntary commitment". Its Digital and Tech Skills Deal puts the main routes into work under one sign-up, and "signing the Deal is not a condition of using any of them".
The routes the Deal covers are secondary school work experience, digital T Level industry placements of at least 315 hours, foundation apprenticeships, apprenticeships at Levels 3 to 6, TechFirst undergraduate placements and the Jobs Guarantee.
The plan's headline ambition is "200,000 entry-level jobs over 10 years", or "20,000 entry-level jobs a year on average", and it calls this "an ambition shared by government and industry, not a forecast". The launch press release chose another word: DCMS "publishes the Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan, setting a target of 20,000 entry level jobs a year".
This 200,000 stands apart from the more than 200,000 paid jobs for young people that DWP's youth jobs drive aimed to help unlock in March 2026, under the previous government. It is also separate from the additional 200,000 work experience placements that the plan's own press release attributes to the Prime Minister's call to employers.
Who counts as entry level, and what the 200,000 counts
Annex A gives the definition. "Entry-level jobs", apprenticeships included, are "roles open to applicants with less than one year's relevant experience", and depending on the occupation they "may require qualifications from Level 3 upwards".
The plan defines entry level by the experience a role needs, so people moving into their first technology role are in scope. Entry level "describes the relevant experience a role requires, not the age or previous employment of the person who fills it". Young people remain the priority, but career changers, returners and "people moving into their first technology role within their own organisation" can all take entry-level roles.
What counts towards the headline figure sits in a box headed "Recording opportunities without double counting". It reads: "Only entry-level jobs, including apprenticeships, count towards the 200,000. Work experience and placements are recorded separately." It also says "The same opportunity should not be counted twice, including across Jobs Plans", and "Training for someone who remains in the same job is not new entry."
The press release's notes to editors say the government aims for employers to "collectively create or fill 20,000 entry-level roles each year", which "may involve some employers establishing new positions, while others fill existing entry-level vacancies they might not otherwise have prioritised".
What the 800,000 measures, and where data analysts sit
The plan's largest figure, "800,000 digital and tech roles to be filled over 10 years", is "an indicative estimate of how many people employers will need to hire between 2025 and 2035". It sums around 550,000 new jobs in 30 priority occupations and around 250,000 people who will need replacing as they retire or leave the sector.
Its base is Skills England's needs assessment for the digital and technologies sector, published with the Department for Work and Pensions on 1 June 2026, which the plan calls "the guiding document for this plan". The estimate "does not model the effect of AI", and Skills England sees a "heightened risk that projections of AI-exposed occupations including digital occupations are too high".
A footnote in the plan keeps the figure apart from the hiring evidence: "Today's fall in entry-level hiring and the 800,000 roles projected over the next decade measure different things".
Data analysts are one of the 30 priority occupations in Skills England's projections. On a different measure, Skills England's Occupations in demand 2025, published on 11 December 2025, rates data analysts "Critical demand", or "substantially higher demand than usual", one of 62 occupations so rated out of 368.
That rating covers the whole occupation at every experience level. It "assesses the current level of demand for an occupation", and Skills England says it does not show where there is a shortage of workers.
What happened to entry-level hiring in data roles
The plan's diagnosis is that "employer expectations are changing faster than the routes that help new entrants gain experience and demonstrate what they can do", and it calls itself "above all, a demand-side plan", aimed at employers opening and sustaining routes into the sector.
The plan's yardstick is cyber security. DCMS and DSIT's report Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2026, published on 29 September 2026, found that the share of core cyber job postings open to people with under a year's experience fell from 25% in 2022 to 16% in 2025.
The foreword's aim is for digital and technology jobs to become "as open to newcomers as cyber security was in 2022". The benchmark covers cyber postings only and comes from a commercial database analysed for government, so it is not official statistics.
The plan prints no figure for data roles. It says that "Some of the largest falls are in roles where AI capabilities have grown, such as software engineering, data analysis and data engineering, but this is not yet evidence that AI is the cause."
Its source is DSIT's A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK, published with LinkedIn on 8 June 2026. In LinkedIn's hiring rate as of April 2026, DSIT reported entry-level data analyst hiring down 15% and data engineer hiring down 11%, year on year. It put the UK hiring rate overall at "-14% year-over-year, with every tracked industry in decline".
DSIT called the falls in roles where AI capabilities have increased "not yet causal evidence of AI's impact on hiring", and found for those occupations, Data Analyst included, that "The weakness is specific to the junior tier."
The data is LinkedIn's economic graph, covering hiring and job postings on the platform and "more than 40 million LinkedIn members in the UK". DSIT noted that it "is not a fully representative sample of the labour market" and is best used as a supplement to administrative data. These are not official statistics, and each figure is a change in one platform's hiring rate.
For data analysts at all seniority levels, the skills employers cannot find include "Data Governance", "Data Engineering" and "Data Quality"; those candidates most commonly offer include "SQL", "Python (Programming Language)" and "Microsoft Power BI". DSIT found "zero overlap between the 10 skills employers cannot find and the 10 skills candidates most commonly offer".
Many of the skills in shortage, DSIT said, "reflect capabilities typically developed through operational experience".
Designing the entry-level role
Employers "will need to redesign entry-level roles", the plan says, and early-career jobs "should enable people to work alongside AI tools, gain practical experience and develop the judgement, oversight and application skills that remain distinctly human". Such roles are "how the sector develops its future senior engineers and specialists"; cut them, it warns, and "the shortages of experienced staff that employers report today are likely to grow".
Skills England's assessment points the same way, to a shift in digital work "towards oversight, assurance, judgement, and communication, supported by AI-enabled tools".
The AI roles the plan names include data engineers "with strong data and systems capability" and "AI assurance, ethics and governance roles", alongside applied AI and machine learning engineers and AI product and delivery specialists. The plan says they are "different from the 30 Digital and Technologies priority occupations"; its annex "is not a ranking of shortages".
The plan says it will give host employers guidance on what a good placement involves: "defined tasks, a named supervisor, and a realistic view of what someone at the start of their career can contribute".
Skills England finds that apprenticeships "are becoming an increasingly important pathway for supplying priority occupations", and its tables mark Level 3, Level 4/5, and Level 6 and above as expected qualification levels for data analysts. The Deal's apprenticeship route asks employers to take on apprentices "in priority roles, at the level each job needs".
Our view: alongside any of the plan's other routes, such as work experience or T Level placements, an employer hiring into data and AI roles should commit to entry-level roles designed as the plan describes, with defined tasks, a named supervisor and AI in the work.
It should fill them with new entrants or staff moving into their first technology role, and train them through an apprenticeship at the level each role needs. Redesigned roles grow future specialists, and the snapshot ties the skills employers lack to "operational experience".
Our apprenticeships run from Level 3 to Level 5 in data and AI, with AI in every programme. Entry-level data roles fit Data & AI Essentials (Level 3) or Advanced Data & AI (Level 4). The plan's data engineers match Data Engineering (Level 5), and its AI assurance, ethics and governance roles match Data & AI Governance (Level 4), where we teach AI governance.
Paying for the role and finding the person
The Deal brings no money of its own. "It does not merge those programmes or their funding," the plan says, and each route keeps its own rules, as do the incentives for hiring a young person, from a hiring payment to employer National Insurance relief.
For apprenticeships, the Growth and Skills Levy (formerly the Apprenticeship Levy) is paid by employers whose pay bill is above a threshold, and each apprenticeship standard has a funding band maximum, the cap on what levy funds or government funding will pay for its training and assessment.
Under the apprenticeship funding rules for August 2026 to July 2027, the government pays all training and assessment up to that cap for a 16 to 24-year-old starting in England on or after 1 August 2026 at an employer outside the levy or short of levy funds, leaving anything above it to the employer.
To find candidates, the plan points to public services. Through the Jobs and Careers Service, Sector-based Work Academy Programmes and Connect to Work, "employers can access pre-screened candidates, tailored recruitment campaigns and, for larger firms, a dedicated account manager, at no cost".
Existing routes "such as the Jobs and Careers Service and apprenticeship services, remain open to all employers", and our London and Oxford Skills Bootcamps are a further place to find entry-level candidates.
The plan wants a broker in each area, an organisation that "knows the local employers, holds the offers they have made, knows the young people looking for them, and puts the two together". It commits no money to one: "Any further support for brokerage will be decided separately", and its regional TechFirst contacts are "not a new brokerage offer or a regional allocation of the 200,000 ambition".
The plan sets this beside the mayoral apprenticeship brokerage pilots, and says its own brokerage "is broader than the pilots are funded to test".
Making the commitment
An employer signs up once, through TechFirst, which "builds on the CyberFirst programme, previously delivered by the National Cyber Security Centre". The guidance's first step is its community sign-up form, after which "The TechFirst team will contact you to progress your membership and advise on the best way to get involved."
The plan also gives an email route, TechFirst@dsit.gov.uk, and organisations can join the TechFirst Community without signing the Deal.
The guidance names Members and Partners. "Membership is open to all eligible organisations", and Partner status "is for organisations making a substantial commitment, relative to their size, across both the TechFirst programme and the Digital and Tech Skills Deal", agreed with the TechFirst team through a memorandum of understanding. "All support for TechFirst programme activities must be provided free of charge."
At launch, "TechFirst Partners, including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Cognizant, Arm, Kainos, QinetiQ and AtkinsRéalis, have together committed over 10,000 work experience, placement and learning opportunities". The plan expects more: "Employers will make further commitments through the Skills Deal."
One sign-up answers what employers told the plan's authors: "Smaller employers, facing the cost of engaging with several programmes at once, often step back altogether."
How much to offer is each employer's judgement. The plan asks for a commitment "proportionate to their size and capacity", and the guidance says "Activity you already deliver counts towards your commitment."
Where the commitment meets a tender
For suppliers to central government, the plan ties the Deal to procurement. "Public sector employers can make commitments through the Skills Deal", and suppliers "can deliver on these commitments in many ways", including "through existing programmes such as TechFirst". The plan wants each commitment to "form part of their workforce planning and social value commitments".
Larger central government procurements commenced on or after 1 January 2027 will score social value, and apprenticeships and work placements are among the skills activities that can count towards it.
The road to 2030
The plan was published on 21 October 2026 as "the start of a process". The employer's own steps come next: deciding which entry-level roles to design and offer, then signing up through TechFirst.
After 1 January 2027, when PPN 026 starts for larger central government procurements, the next date is BCS's, set out in its article on the plan: "Every learner completing a digital T Level, V Level or apprenticeship will be able to gain recognition against a BCS professional standard at no cost from April 2027".
Each year, every committed employer gives its short public update, the plan reports progress, and the Digital Skills Council "will review progress against this plan each year". "Three years after publication", which falls in 2029, "progress will be comprehensively reviewed and an updated plan published". And 2030 is the horizon the plan sets for every employer's commitment.
Frequently asked questions
Does the plan reach Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
"Skills policy is devolved," the plan says, and it treats foundation apprenticeships, T Levels and V Levels, Technical Excellence Colleges and Skills Bootcamps as it describes them as English provision. The Youth Jobs Grant and Youth Hubs cover Great Britain, and TechFirst delivers "across the UK". The levy is collected UK-wide, but levy accounts pay only for apprentices in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own schemes.
What will the yearly update have to report?
"Reporting must be limited to information that participating employers can provide," the plan says. Published reporting will cover young people's employer encounters, placements hosted, apprenticeships and entry-level roles filled, smaller firms supported and, where data allow, location. Its format, to be agreed with techUK, BCS and others, is not yet published. The Industrial Strategy Unit in the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade tracks commitments across all Jobs Plans.
Does the plan ask anything about staff we already employ?
"Employers invest in their current workforce, so that staff have access to the digital and AI training they need to benefit fully from these technologies," the plan says. AI's gains, it adds, "depend on people knowing how to deploy, supervise and integrate these tools", and AI Skills Boost aims at "up to 10 million workers" by 2030.
Will it fit your cohort?
Tell us your cohort size and what your people need to be doing by next year, and we will say whether we are the right shape, including when we are not.