The State of Tech Graduate Hiring in Northern Ireland: Navigating the AI Era

Over the last few months, I’ve hosted more than 40 technology leaders from across Northern Ireland around the table discussing one topic that I think is becoming increasingly important: Where have all the graduate and early-career opportunities gone?

5 Factors Reshaping Junior Tech Recruitment

Things that came out of the roundtables were the following:

1. Senior hires feel safer.
2. Mentoring takes time and creates a ‘drag effect’ on wider teams.
3. Tech teams are leaner by necessity, so bandwidth is limited.
4. Hybrid working has changed how junior people learn from experienced colleagues.
5. And now AI can do a lot of the work that traditionally gave someone their first opportunity to develop.

That last point generated probably the most interesting discussions across each of the sessions.

Where have all the graduate and early career opportunities gone?

Graduate hiring across technology has dropped significantly over the last few years – with up to a 40% decrease in opportunities depending on specific skillsets/areas. It would be easy to conclude that graduates simply aren’t coming out of university with the skills businesses need.

But after several hours of discussion with Engineering Directors, VPs, Technical Directors, founders and technology leaders, I don’t think it is that simple.

The bigger issue is that the environment around them has changed dramatically.

Businesses (and leaders) are under pressure to deliver more with fewer people.

AI is making junior people better. But is it also making it harder for them to learn?

One leader described an intern who was outperforming much more experienced engineers in certain areas because of how effectively they were using AI.

That sounds like a fantastic advert for the next generation - but it also created a problem.

If AI solves every difficult problem for someone, when do they develop the ability to solve those problems themselves?

Traditionally, junior engineers learned through repetition: write the test, fix the bug, investigate the issue, build small features, all under the supervision of a senior team, with juniors being able to frequently ask their seniors why something didn't work.

Make a lot of mistakes! Then try again. Today, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and other tools can potentially do much of that work in seconds.

Great for productivity? Yes, but potentially really problematic for the development of junior talent.

One analogy from the room stuck with me: If you give someone a forklift every time they go to the gym and want to lift something heavy, they’ll be able to lift tonnes! But they aren't getting any stronger. That is the challenge technology leaders now need to solve.

How do we use AI to accelerate somebody's career without allowing it to bypass the experiences that build judgement, critical thinking and technical depth?

The Hidden Impact of Halting Junior Recruitment

Another point that came out of these conversations was the impact further up the organisation. Everyone has felt the squeeze on demand for more experienced tech talent (competition is as fierce as ever for senior/principal engineers, with salaries rising – and we’ve noticed an up to 30%+ increase for some skillsets in software engineering specifically).

But when you stop hiring junior engineers, your mid-level engineers stop mentoring them. That means they lose one of the experiences that helps turn a good engineer into a great senior engineer or future leader.

Explaining why. Reviewing someone else's thinking. Coaching, delegating, giving feedback. Helping somebody recover from a mistake. These are all valuable leadership skills.

So when we remove junior hiring, we potentially remove development opportunities at several levels of the organisation.

Perhaps we've been asking the wrong question

The question is normally:

"Can we afford to hire graduates?"

Perhaps a better question is:

"How many early career people can we properly develop?"

Those aren't quite the same thing.

There was broad recognition around the table that bringing too many inexperienced people into a team creates a genuine productivity problem.

But bringing one person into a strong team with clearly defined work, good mentoring and realistic expectations can be completely different.

That leads me towards a fairly simple model:

The 90-Day Framework: Learn, Contribute, Own

In the first 30 days, build foundations.

Ensure your graduates understand the product, your customers, the specifics of the technology and the standards in the wider team. Pair with experienced people. Use AI, but understand and challenge what it produces.

In days 30 to 60, allow them (and encourage them) to contribute safely.

Testing/QA, smaller bugs, working on internal tooling. Documentation, data validation, support analysis or defined pieces of product work.

By 90 days, own something. This could be a specific problem; a workflow, feature or an improvement. Something with a measurable outcome.

That feels much more useful than hiring someone and hoping they gradually find their place.

We also need to rethink what "early-careers" means

One of the strongest parts of the discussion was around apprenticeships and alternative pathways.

University remains an excellent route for many people, but it shouldn't automatically be the only route we consider for technology careers.

There are young people succeeding through apprenticeships, placements and work-based learning who are getting real commercial experience while continuing their education (and not amassing huge amounts of debt!)

Several leaders around the table had seen apprentices or placement students become some of their strongest people.

The challenge is creating enough opportunities, because there is clearly demand from young people.

This is bigger than individual hiring decisions

I don’t believe any individual company is going to solve this. Every organisation has targets, deadlines, budgets and customers today that need to be looked after and can sometimes take priority in the boardroom.

I completely understand why hiring an experienced engineer who can contribute immediately is attractive - but if every organisation makes the same decision, where do the experienced engineers come from in five or ten years?

That is the part I think deserves more discussion; AI isn't going away, nor should it!

It gives the next generation an incredible set of tools, but the challenge for leaders isn't to stop them using those tools.

It is to make sure we're still giving people the opportunity to develop the skills underneath them. Otherwise, we risk becoming very good at making today's teams more productive while quietly removing the bottom rungs of the ladder for tomorrow's.

I'd be interested to hear how other technology leaders are approaching this.

What meaningful work can a graduate or junior genuinely own in your organisation today that helps them learn, but also adds value to the business?

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