Both things are true, and treating "tech" as one market is what makes the question confusing. The saturation is concentrated in a specific segment, and the shortages are equally specific.
Where saturation is real
Entry-level generalist software and web development. A decade of bootcamps, career-change programmes and computer science expansion produced a large supply of junior developers at exactly the point when employers cut graduate intake. The result is genuinely brutal competition for junior roles, with hundreds of applicants routine.
Entry-level data analysis and data science. The same story - a great deal of training supply meeting reduced junior demand. See why analytics hiring is so competitive.
Generalist digital marketing and content roles, particularly remote ones, which draw national or international applicant pools.
Where shortages persist
- Cyber security, especially with clearance or regulated-industry experience. Driven by compliance obligations rather than growth appetite.
- Cloud and platform engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure-as-code skills.
- Data engineering - consistently harder to fill than data science, and less glamorous, which is precisely why.
- Legacy and specialist stacks. Systems that large institutions cannot replace and few people can maintain.
- Embedded, industrial and safety-critical software, particularly in defence, energy and medical devices.
- Anyone senior who can also communicate with the business, which is the perennial shortage in every technical field.
The pattern underneath
The shortage is not of technical people. It is of technical people with two or three years of demonstrated production experience in a specific area, or with a rarer combination - technical skill plus domain knowledge, or technical skill plus regulatory context.
This creates the well-known trap: employers want experience, entry-level roles are where experience is acquired, and entry-level roles are the saturated segment.
How to break through the entry-level bottleneck
- Specialise deliberately rather than being a generalist junior. Depth in a less crowded area beats breadth in a crowded one.
- Enter sideways. Support, QA, technical operations, internal tooling and implementation roles are less contested and lead into engineering with real production experience.
- Bring domain expertise. A logistics professional who learns data engineering is far more employable than a generic junior data engineer, because the combination is scarce.
- Ship something real and public. Not tutorial projects - something with users, a deployment story and decisions you can defend.
- Target unglamorous sectors. Manufacturing, insurance, local government and utilities need technical people and compete for them far less aggressively than consumer tech.
The honest read on the aggregate
Tech employment overall remains large and technology continues to spread into every sector - the story is not decline, it is redistribution away from a narrow set of well-known employers and towards the rest of the economy. That is a genuinely better market for anyone willing to work outside the obvious places.
The combination worth building
Statistical and analytical skills paired with domain knowledge is one of the more reliably scarce combinations. The Statistics for Business course at London School of Business UK is a practical component of that. Enquire today.