Sanderson is excited to announce that following the hugely successful inaugural event last year, we are once again collaborating with Tech West England Advocates and our colleagues at Sanderson iKas Hong Kong to sponsor Tech Mission to Hong Kong for 2024 during 21^st-25^th October 2024.

For any founders and scale-ups in the technology industry, including those in the clean tech, health tech, fintech, AI and robotics space, this unique 5-day will offer an unrivalled opportunity to explore the Hong Kong tech ecosystem as a platform to expand your business into.

What does the event involve?

During the Mission to Hong Kong week tech owners and attendees will enjoy a comprehensive programme including being taken on an eye-opening journey through the thriving tech ecosystem and vibrant city of Hong Kong, visit several science parks with accelerators and incubators, meet counterpart Hong Kong founders and investors, foster vital relationships and gain cutting-edge market insight, participate in a reverse pitch investor event and enjoy dinners and networking evenings with partners such as KPMG, Pitchflix and Eaton Club.

Attendees will also have opportunity to pitch at the official ‘UK Tech Founder Showcase Event’ as part of the StartmeupHK Festival. There will be unique networking opportunities with not only your tech founder peers, but potential investors, influential venture capitalists and potential business partners.

Why Hong Kong?

The Hong Kong business market is ripe with opportunities to build long-lasting relationships in the tech space and is renowned for its connectivity and infrastructure, making it a great destination for large and small tech businesses looking for a gateway to opportunities in mainland China and the rest of Asia.

Speaking to Sanderson i-Kas Country Director for Hong Kong Adam Kennedy, he said:

“We are delighted to continue our support to ‘Mission to Hong Kong’ in 2024. Richard and his team did such an amazing job for last year’s mission bringing together some of the UK’s most innovative tech starts ups to Hong Kong. The mission was such a success in showcasing the scale, quality, diversity, and ambition of our tech community in Hong Kong. The mission provides tech founders with the information and connections to successfully scale in Hong Kong. We thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to share our insights as recruiters during the programme of events as well as helping the founders grow their businesses in the past 12 months.”

Register your interest today

Could the Tech Mission to Hong Kong Week be the gateway to the Asia-Pacific you’ve been searching for your business?

Find out more and register your interest to attend here.

An experience not to be missed

As last year’s tech founder attendees will testify, this Mission is a rewarding and memorable market entry experience, that opens a wealth of opportunities for expanding into Asia Pacific, via Hong Kong. Take a look at some of the feedback we received following the 2023 Week:

‘Our team met a huge variety of investors, founders and partners and wouldn’t hesitate to return on a similar mission organised by Hewlett Rand for UK Tech Advocates in the future’ Alex Balderstone, CEO & Co-Founder. Kaiku

‘As a direct result of our participation, we are exploring exciting commercial opportunities and partnerships with those we met and we aim to set up our Hong Kong presence during 2024. MCG highly recommend Tech Founders from Start Up and Scale Ups to make the most of this valuable export opportunity.’ Clinton LIU 劉長亮 Liu, CEO, MCG

‘We have garnered significant interest from potential investors, and discussions are currently underway.’ Hao Pang, CEO, Quantum Science Ltd

Would you like to hear more from Sanderson and learn about the work we do? You can sign up to join our mailing list here for a variety of updates, access to our market leading salary benchmarking data, white papers, reports and blogs PLUS our latest news and event invites.

There is a worrying trend beginning to come into the world of recruitment and that is the proliferation of AI bots doing the filtering. I get it, there is a need for more automation, more sifting, more ability to filter to get to the best candidate. But if you take the human element out of a recruitment process you risk alienating the lifeblood of your business, the thing that makes your organisation tick, and probably a subset of your potential customer base – your people!

The rise and risks of Automation in the interview process

But worse still….the AI bot that is dehumanising the selection process is being counter punched by the AI generated cover letter and CV. These can be cleverly structured in 10 minutes by a large language model on behalf of a candidate who is gaming the application of AI at the other end of the process.

This can even roll over into online interviews. Some interviewers in a quest to reduce time and thinking could look to ask AI to generate a series of interview questions for the job role they are hiring for, only then to also be met by responses that are being real-time generated by AI by the candidate at the other end of the call to deliver the best possible response.

A worrying future of AI in recruitment processes?

Research conducted by Bright Minds indicated that 38% of applicants are now using AI to enhance their applications. Let’s face it – that number is only going to increase as AI becomes more ubiquitous and available.

And whilst my framing may be slightly glib, how far away are we from regular instances where AI assessment bots are assessing AI generated applications as a matter of course. Where does this end?

As I referenced in my previous post the recruitment word has changed. The expectation of feedback on a CV has gone, in fact CV feedback that is richer than an acknowledgement is an absolute rarity. More worrying, increasingly interview feedback is disappearing unless you are successful. And whilst AI can definitely reduce the admin burden on both sides of the process, it should be used to free up more time to be spent on human interaction – not less. And I fear that we are into a worrying cycle of less human interaction.

Breaking the AI cycle

The ultimate impact is that the candidate keeps swiping (much like one might when using popular dating apps, only to apply for jobs); and then more successful interviews end in rejection because something better came along for them.

Meanwhile the client keeps swiping too – letting AI assess more and more candidates. This results in more candidates being ghosted, and so the loop becomes a spiral, and the spiral becomes habit and things just simply get worse – until someone breaks that cycle. I believe we need to re-insert high quality human interaction into critical stages in the recruitment process.

I would say this though, wouldn’t I?! In a specialist, talent scarce, sector where human interaction is critical – many stones must be turned over to find the right person for the roles that we engage on. Yet at the same time we are increasingly being asked to comply with processes that have elements of what I have discussed above – because organisations think this works for volume hires – but for me it’s a slippery slope.

There is no substitute for high quality conversations, the building of relationships irrespective of outcome, and professional engagement at every stage of the process.

At Sanderson Government and Defence, we value building long-term relationships and owning the problem through to completion. We know from over 20 years in the talent solution business that this approach builds better teams and makes for a more resilient and cohesive workforce.

If you’d like to chat more about your recruitment needs and the bespoke solutions we could provide you in your recruitment processes, please do get in touch.

Would you like to hear more from Sanderson and learn about the work we do? You can sign up to join our mailing list here for a variety of updates, access to our market leading salary benchmarking data, white papers, reports and blogs PLUS our latest news and event invites.

With an increase in digital and technology candidate availability this quarter, we’ve been paying special attention to the rise in demand for Artificial Intelligence skills, and with that, the emergence of specialist AI roles such as AI Engineers.

Growth of AI roles

Our data has reported that UK job adverts asking for AI skills have doubled over the past year, with more than 7000 adverts on LinkedIn asking for these in the UK. We have even seen a remarkable 16-fold increase in job adverts asking for generative AI skills in general.

So where does this leave the tech and digital job landscape?

The emerging skillset of AI Engineers

With this rise in the need for AI skills, we have seen the demand for AI Engineers in the UK surge in beginning of 2024, reflecting a broader global trend towards the integration of artificial intelligence across various sectors.

Businesses across the UK are undergoing rapid digital transformation, spurred by the need to remain competitive in an increasingly digital economy. AI technologies are at the forefront of this shift, enabling companies to enhance efficiency, improve customer experiences, and innovate products and services.

No longer confined to tech giants and research labs; AI is being widely adopted across industries such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing. From automating complex tasks to providing predictive analytics and personalizing user experiences, the applications of AI are vast and growing.

The UK government has even recognised the strategic importance of AI and has invested heavily in AI research and development. Initiatives like the National AI Strategy aim to make the UK a global leader in AI technology. These efforts are stimulating the growth of AI startups and innovation hubs and ultimately leading to an increase in demand for AI Engineers across many industries.

The UK as a hub for AI Engineers

Our data suggests that the UK actually has the largest talent pool of AI Engineers in Europe, boasting 18% of the total talent pool.

This compares to 15% of the talent pool being based in Germany, 13% in France, 8% in Poland and 7% of the talent pool based in Spain.

Where in the UK are AI Engineers based?

When focusing in on the UK, a whopping 79% of this talent pool are based in London.

However, if you’re looking to hire this skillset across other areas of the UK, other significant talent pools include 5.7% of AI Engineers being in Bristol, 5.6% in Edinburgh, 2.8% in Manchester and 2.7% in Glasglow.

Interesting statistics on UK AI Engineers

We’ve rounded up some key stats for you on UK based AI Engineers:

• 7% of these are male
• 8% have been in their current role for less than 2 years
• The most common job titles are now AI Engineer, AI Research Engineer and AI Software Engineer compared to the previously common titles of Data Scientist, Software Engineer and Machine Learning Engineer.

Conclusion

With such appetite in the global market for specialist AI skills, we expect demand to continue its rapid increase to the extent that the AI Engineer job title is widely seen across the tech sector. In the face of this demand, employers will need to hire based on transferable skills until the talent pool matures.

For further information on digital and technology talent trends and predictions for this coming quarter, download our latest Technology and Digital Insight Report today.

If you would like to discuss how best to get hiring and building out your AI skill sets, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Sanderson team. We’re ready to help.

Would you like to hear more from Sanderson and learn about the work we do? You can sign up to join our mailing list here for a variety of updates, access to our market leading salary benchmarking data, white papers, reports and blogs PLUS our latest news and event invites.

Responsible for developing and implementing many business-critical applications and software platforms, Java Developers have for a long time held specialised and essential roles in many defence sector organisations.  

But as we move through Q4, will the demand for security cleared Java Developers still be as strong?  

In this opinion piece, Sanderson’s Head of Recruitment Services for our Government & Defence team James Corcoran gives his thoughts on the current state of the market as well as his projections for the future of Java Developers in the defence sector.  

The current state of the Government & Defence sector job market 

In good news for the government & defence sector, we’re seeing indications that the market is slowly rebounding. This is driven largely by contract demand as security organisations continue to be cautious after a year of rationalisation.  

Certain roles are tending to have more demand than others, and a Java Developer is one of these in demand skill sets. This could account for the 8% increase in salary costs that we saw between Q2 2023 and Q3 2023.  

Software roles in demand 

Java is one of the most popular programming languages used in enterprise companies, yet despite this 8% salary increase, is it set to start losing ground in terms of companies wanting to hire these skills?  

There are several surveys which do actually show a decline starting. In fact StackOverflow’s Developer survey recorded a drop from 33.3% to 30.6%, whilst the TIOBE index in October 2023 showed that Java’s year-on-year rating had dropped by 3.9%. 

What does the future hold for Java Developers and the associated talent pool? 

A big question in my mind is, are we going to see a further decline?  

Certainly, Oracle’s decision to stop all security updates for Java 8 without a support agreement is a warning shot. This coupled with their decision to change their pricing model to a new one that, according to Gartner, could cost organisations from 2 to 5 times more in annual licensing costs, only fuels speculation for Java’s decline. 

In my opinion though, Java is not going anywhere. 

It’s still the fourth in TIOBE’s Programming Index, and combined with the salary increases we’ve seen, it’s a proven, secure, and safe programming language with a significant adoption rate in many organisations.  

Over the next 12-18 months I believe the Java talent pool will skew to the later generations, with more experienced candidates and, as a result, be more contract-driven over the next few years.  

Our talent solution 

If you want to stay ahead of the curve and ensure you’re hiring the right security cleared candidate in the Java Development field for your organisation, we can help.  

As specialists in sourcing hard to find talent we will always solve your talent problems through to completion. You can find out more about our Government & Defence Recruitment services here. 

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let me know how I can help you. 

James Corcoran, Head of Recruitment

[email protected], +44 (0) 748 430 0887