If there’s one thing that comes up consistently in conversations across Greater Manchester’s tech ecosystem, it’s that talent has been one of the biggest drivers behind the region’s tech success.
At least that was one of the clearest takeaways from interviews for the first Manchester feature in Prolific North’s GRAFT Regional Tech Champions series, backed by MHA, Vista Insurance and GM Business Growth Hub. Homegrown scale-ups like legaltech firm Summize hailed the region’s “deep” talent pool while major global players like Booking.com and Hexaware continue to invest in the region.
The numbers back those statements up too. The region recorded a 19.7% increase in job growth over the past decade, significantly above the UK average of 13.9%, according to a recent Centre for Cities report.
And as Sean Mitchell, partner at MHA, puts it, Greater Manchester now has a “strong pipeline” of scale-up businesses, investors, universities and entrepreneurial talent.
READ MORE: Where Greater Manchester’s tech growth is happening — and what’s driving it
But the challenge facing Greater Manchester is no longer about attracting talent like it may have been a decade ago. Now the focus is on whether the region can continue developing enough experienced people to power the next stage of its tech growth.
I put that question to founders, recruiters, educators, tech employers and industry leaders across Manchester. Their answers paint a picture of an ecosystem that continues to grow, but is one now grappling with how it develops future leaders in a world where AI is reshaping careers, employer expectations are changing and businesses are competing for increasingly experienced people.
The challenge isn’t attracting talent anymore
For years, tech talent has been one of Greater Manchester’s biggest selling points. Scroll through almost any announcement story about a business expanding into the region and it’s likely to cite access to talent as one of the reasons for choosing the city.
But the conversation is shifting. Katie Gallagher OBE, managing director of Manchester Digital, passionately believes the region’s talent pool remains strong, but warns AI is already changing the way businesses are hiring.
“One of the big challenges at the moment is how AI is changing job roles,” she explains. “The digital and tech sector has quite a high exposure rate to automation.”
Her concerns reflect a wider trend as a World Economic Forum survey last year found around 40% of employers could reduce their workforce in areas where AI can automate tasks.
Gallagher says she’s already seeing that play out in early careers.
“What the data says and what companies say aren’t always the same thing. There has been around a 20% drop in graduate and entry level roles, and a lot of employers are saying it’s down to AI, because they can replace and automate some of the stuff that happens early on.
“If we’re not training early stage talent, we’re not going to have mid-level talent.”
It’s why Gallagher is now co-chair of the government’s Early Careers Jobs Alliance, which is exploring how employers can continue investing in junior talent as AI reshapes entry-level roles.
“For me, we have to broaden these talent pools, but we need to make sure that we keep curating it and make sure that we’re giving people opportunities. “
According to a recent Manchester Digital Sector Insights report, around a quarter of SMEs across the region said they were either reconsidering their approach to early-stage talent or not recruiting for early-stage roles at all.
“Generally businesses are full of goodwill and they want to do the right things. If you’re a start-up or an SME, it gets tougher. It has been a very difficult couple of years in terms of the economy, so people are heavily focused on their bottom line and it’s just about keeping the lights on for some companies,” she explains.
“One of the things we need to think about is how we support and incentivise smaller employers to still offer some of those opportunities.”
Where are tomorrow’s tech leaders?
While there appears to be a healthy pipeline of early-stage tech talent, the bigger gap seemingly appears further along.
Access to skilled staff and markets were cited as the most significant barriers to business growth over the past 12 months, according to the latest Manchester Digital’s 2026 Sector Insights report. And while recruitment has become easier, a third of Greater Manchester businesses still report being unable to fill all their tech vacancies, with senior and specialist roles proving the most difficult.
Ray Law, founder of Manchester fintech moneyappi, believes that reflects just how far the region has come.
“Manchester has just kept growing. It is no longer London’s ‘little brother’ anymore. It’s the UK’s largest tech economy outside of the capital. You have global names here, from IBM to Roku, and other businesses have relocated here,” he says.
But despite that progress, he believes the next challenge is developing enough experienced talent to support the ecosystem.
“The term talent in Manchester is mentioned a lot but we don’t look at the level of talent. There is a large pool of talent but they are relatively junior. When we come to attracting more experienced and senior talent, it’s relatively difficult.”
Rather than simply attracting experienced hires from elsewhere, Law believes Manchester needs more businesses where graduates and early-stage tech talent can build that experience.
“We’ve got this super large pool of graduates, around 36,000 just in the Manchester region alone, where are they going to go and what is their career path and what are they building?”
He believes part of the answer lies in helping more Manchester businesses to scale. He argues that greater public and private investment would allow more start-ups to become scale-ups and remain in Greater Manchester, creating more opportunities for that junior talent to progress into senior roles.
“As they grow, they’ll naturally attract both junior and senior talent because this is the place they’ll want to go,” he says.
“Those are the people who take a start-up to a scale-up. They started out as a junior and worked their way up, and now they feel it’s their turn to help another start-up reach an exit or the next stage of growth. But we can’t attract those people if our start-ups never get the chance to maintain their status as scale-ups in Greater Manchester or they’re forced to grow elsewhere.”
That challenge is one Somayeh Taheri, CEO and founder of Manchester cleantech scale-up UrbanChain, has experienced first-hand.
Since launching UrbanChain in 2017, the business has grown from a team of three to around 80 employees. But she says finding highly specialised technical talent remains difficult.
“I would say we are far behind on the first layer of tech talent, the foundational talent where people might build new programming languages. It’s not because people don’t want to do it, it’s because the market doesn’t reflect the need for that and doesn’t know how to treat that talent.”
Even then, the best people are “gems”.
“In the early days, we couldn’t even afford them, to be honest. But you always need to have a vision. There are people that might work in banking or fintech but want to work elsewhere and be proud of what they’re doing. That’s where the company’s culture then comes into it.”
But she believes businesses also have a responsibility to develop talent themselves. .
“From 250 applicants or so, you’ll find one. But interestingly, when you give people an opportunity, they turn into gems. Our team is Manchester based, because we wanted to build the team, then also train them to become that foundational layer.”
Tom Keighly, founder of Manchester-based HR tech start-up urfuture, believes AI risks making that challenge even harder as much of the work traditionally done by junior talent is already changing.
“A lot of the work that was done by junior people will be done by AI and it’ll be overseen by more senior engineers who will check it and deploy it,” he explains.
“I don’t know if those jobs will exist beyond probably the next 10 to 15 years. AI will remove a lot of those research-based jobs, but you have to have a talent pipeline still coming through. You’ll end up with a top-heavy workforce and there won’t be the young people coming through to replace those people when they retire. So it’s like a double-edged sword.”
Keighly says his own business is already feeling the pressure when it comes to specific technical expertise.
“There are more businesses in Manchester, but we’re finding it difficult at the moment to recruit an in-house engineer at the price point that we want,” he says.
“We want a commercial developer who wants to understand the business, understand its needs and actually wants to be involved in that side of things and not just be in the background. We want someone that can become a CTO with us over the next two or three years so that we don’t need to use a fractional CTO.”
Pete Farrell, product and technology director at Manchester-based automotive marketplace Autotrader, agrees that when it comes to senior talent, finding the right people can still take time.
“On senior or very experienced hires, it is definitely a longer path to find talent as you are trying to get the blend right – maybe specific skills or product knowledge – as well as strong organisational fit, someone that can bring something new, who can lead and inspire… and often that very targeted need does result in geographic challenges… such as London based,” he explains.
Despite the competition for specialist talent more widely, Farrell remains optimistic that Manchester and the North West has all the ingredients needed to continue building the tech workforce it needs.
“I’m confident that the North West, and specifically Manchester, has the talent. We’re seeing it from an engineering perspective. We’ve got a number of candidates that we’re following at the moment and they’re local, so I’ve got no qualms about the North West producing talent – and the right talent.”
Experience alone isn’t enough anymore
The experiences businesses are describing are also reflected in what GM Business Growth Hub is seeing across the region. Laura Bennett, organisational development advisor for the digital, creative and technology sector at GM Business Growth Hub, says that while the region remains one of the UK’s “strongest” digital and tech hubs with a growing talent pool, many businesses continue to report challenges when recruiting experienced software engineering, data, AI, cybersecurity and digital product talent.
Now, she believes AI is changing how businesses think about talent.
“Rather than replacing technical roles altogether, many organisations are finding that AI is changing the skills required within those roles. We are seeing increasing demand for professionals who can work effectively alongside AI tools, apply critical thinking, provide oversight and governance, and translate technical outputs into meaningful business value,” she explains.
She adds employers across the region are now focusing more on the skills technology cannot easily replicate.
“Interestingly, the more capable AI becomes, the more valuable human skills are becoming,” she says. And that’s “particularly evident” within middle management roles.
“They are increasingly responsible for coaching teams, navigating change, maintaining engagement and helping employees adapt to new ways of working. As AI adoption accelerates, the ability to build trust, communicate effectively and lead people through uncertainty is becoming a critical capability.”
“Through GM Business Growth Hub, we support businesses to take a longer-term and more sustainable approach to attracting and retaining talent. This includes helping employers develop talent pipelines through apprenticeships, T Levels, graduate recruitment and other early-career pathways, alongside workforce planning, leadership development and skills strategies.”
Recruiters are already seeing that shift, says Jonathan Moran, director at Better Placed.
“The biggest shift I’m seeing is the impact AI is having on junior hiring. Entry-level engineers have traditionally learned through tasks like writing boilerplate code, testing and debugging, but AI is now accelerating much of that work.
“That means businesses may hire fewer junior developers while expecting those they do recruit to contribute more quickly. It’s why internships, placements and structured graduate programmes have never been more important if we want to keep developing the next generation of tech talent.”
Claire Foreman, director of the Greater Manchester Institute of Technology, says employers are increasingly looking for what she calls “durable skills”, which includes ‘critical thinking, innovation and the ability to work with different people’. But she believes education can only take people so far.
“Most employers would tell you life is a bit tough at the moment, with National Insurance going up and other things. They do have a bit of a tendency to want somebody who is fully experienced in a job, and young people and colleges cannot produce that.
“If you take on an apprentice, if you take young talent and nurture it, there is also evidence to say they stay with you longer, they are more loyal, you’re not forever spending on recruitment.”
Building careers, not just filling jobs
Rather than continuing to compete for experienced talent, some of Greater Manchester’s biggest tech employers are investing in developing and retaining the people they already have.
Autotrader, which employs around 900 people in Manchester with more than 290 engineers, is one of them.
The business has run apprenticeships for more than a decade and recently expanded its T Levels programme, with seven of the first eight local students who completed placements due to join as apprentices this September.
When it comes to AI, product and technology director Pete Farrell says the focus is on helping early-career engineers use the technology as a “complimentary” tool to accelerate what they’re already doing.
But developing talent is only part of the challenge, keeping it is just as important. Having spent more than 13 years at Autotrader himself, he says the business has continued to evolve, giving people opportunities to grow without needing to look elsewhere.
“It feels like we’re always pushing in new directions in terms of the way we’re thinking. It’s progressive here, the culture is great and you can progress. Something new always comes around whether it’s new products or a new part of the business to get involved in,” he says.
“Some of our most successful product people joined us in a different capacity earlier in their career and have grown with us.”
And he hopes people will feel they can build successful careers without leaving the region.
“The more success stories we have of Manchester-based businesses growing with North West talent, the more that success will inspire others,” he says.
Businesses are already adapting their hiring and retention strategies to that changing landscape, says James Porter, managing director of health and protection at Vista Insurance.
Rather than relying solely on ‘expensive’ external hires, more employers are investing in learning and development, mentoring and leadership programmes to help people build their careers inside the business.
“Examples of strategies we are discussing to attract, retain and importantly, develop people are: growing your own talent by investing in learning and development (L&D). This is a shift from hiring expensive talent externally and focusing more senior resources on mentoring or coaching colleagues. In this way, people are seen as a long term asset and more connected to their employer, which in turn reduces attrition.”
He says AI is also changing how organisations think about roles.
“Broadly we are seeing much greater engagement with AI and in particular, its use across entire workforces, rather than confined to specialist teams. Existing and new hire role profiles are being reviewed to include AI capability, with most employers now seeing this as an essential skill.”
Alongside this, he believes company culture continues to be an important factor in attracting and retaining experienced talent.
“I think companies should consider a company culture that leans into flexibility around working hours and location, alongside embracing AI. This supports a healthier work-life balance, it certainly widens the talent pool, and also gives the air of a more interesting working environment,” he explains.
Sean Mitchell, partner at MHA, says high-growth companies often “struggle” to compete with the salaries and brand recognition of larger global businesses, particularly when recruiting senior talent.
“As a result, we’re working with businesses to use equity-based incentives such as EMI schemes and growth shares, giving key employees a genuine stake in the value they help create. When people feel like owners rather than employees, engagement and retention tend to improve significantly,” he explains.
But he says incentives alone are rarely enough: “People increasingly want to understand where the business is heading, how their role contributes to that journey and what opportunities exist for them as the company grows.”
For regional businesses looking to secure investment and continue scaling, investors want to know a company has the leadership, management team and culture to keep growing.
Michelle Mullany, head of deal origination at MHA, says that’s becoming a bigger consideration during investment and acquisition discussions.
“From an M&A perspective, excessive key-person dependency is one of the biggest risks investors identify during due diligence. Investors increasingly want to see a management team that can operate effectively beyond the founder and a business that can continue to scale without relying on a handful of individuals.
“We see private equity in particular place significant emphasis on management strength, succession planning and leadership depth. A great product may attract attention, but a scalable management team is often what gives investors’ confidence to back future growth.”
Mullany says conversations about investment increasingly come back to people.
“When you dig deeper, people and talent are usually at the heart of the discussion. The cost of attracting and retaining skilled employees remains a significant challenge, particularly against a backdrop of inflationary pressures and rising employment costs,” she explains.
“Businesses need robust financial management, governance structures and incentive programmes that can support future growth. The most successful scale-ups recognise that talent retention, financial performance, culture and governance are not separate issues. They are all part of building a business that can grow sustainably.”
Despite some of the wider challenges, Katie Gallagher from Manchester Digital says people across the region have been more optimistic over the past six months.
“Manchester has been incredibly resilient in terms of growth. We now need to think about what growth looks like in the next couple of years. In terms of some of the new technologies coming into play, we need to be thinking about designing an ecosystem that can support that and make sure that we still keep growing talent and making sure people want to have their careers here.”
