Research and analysis
Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025
Research detailing skills needs and job vacancies across the UK cyber security sector.
Documents
Details
This research into the UK cyber security labour market explores the nature and extent of cyber security skills gaps (people lacking appropriate skills) and skills shortages (a lack of people available to work in cyber security job roles). The research uses:
- Representative surveys of cyber sector businesses and the wider population of UK organisations (businesses, charities and public sector organisations).
- Qualitative research with recruitment agents, cyber firms and medium/large organisations in various sectors.
- A secondary analysis of cyber security job postings on the Lightcast labour market database, as well as reviewing the supply of cyber security talent through sources such as the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) and Jisc.
This 2025 report, covering the 2024 calendar year, finds:
- Approximately 143,000 individuals were employed in cyber security roles across the UK economy, representing a 5% increase from the previous year.
- The cyber security workforce gap stabilised at around 3,800 professionals, maintaining a similar size to the previous year (3,500 professionals), and substantially down from 11,100 in the 2023 report.
- Around half of UK businesses (49%) reported a basic technical cyber security skills gap, while 30% reported gaps in more advanced technical areas. Just over a quarter of cyber security businesses (28%) reported a lack of technical skills among their existing employees.
- Women made up just 17% of the cyber security workforce, falling to 12% in senior positions (6+ years of experience), compared 48% female representation in the wider UK workforce.
- Just over half of cyber security businesses (53%) reported using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their day-to-day operations, and 65% expected demand for AI skills to grow over the following 12 months. However, only 42% had provided any AI training to their staff.
- There were 32,370 core cyber job postings across the UK, representing a 33% decrease from the previous year.
This is the seventh iteration of the research, which has been carried out on an approximately annual basis. You can see the previous versions of this report below:
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2024
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2023
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2022
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2021
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2020
- Cyber security skills in the UK labour market (December 2018)
This research is part of the government’s wider work to improve cyber security skills, develop the UK cyber ecosystem and increase cyber resilience across the UK economy.
Updates to this page
Published 19 September 2025