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AI advances clear path to software development careers
Programming skills are always in demand, but with artificial intelligence, people will have to adapt their approach to writing code
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), starting a career as a novice software developer or retraining to become a software engineer is now far easier, and people with the right skills can often command higher salaries than the national average.
Data published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows that the average salary for UK workers is £724 a week, or £37,648 a year.
The government is keen to grow the UK’s digital technology talent pool to provide the skills needed to power the digital and AI innovations required to transform public services and grow the UK economy through Labour’s plan for change.
But in the UK, as is the case in other regions around the world, there is a shortage of people with digital technology skills, which means employers are offering higher salaries than the national average for people with the right level of expertise.
A study from IT training provider Tecnovy that analyses salary data from Robert Half, Indeed and Glassdoor reported that the top 40 highest earning digital technology-related vacancies currently advertised have annual salaries ranging from over £40,000 to almost £124,000.
The salaries for new tech job vacancies appear to be driven by demand for senior IT management: people with job titles such as chief information officer (CIO); chief information security officer (CISO); chief architect; and chief technology officer (CTO), each of which are commanding six-figure salaries.
Lower down the salary and seniority scale, the study identified 25 job titles where people can expect to earn at least £50,000 and sometimes significantly more. These range from IT manager jobs to various developer, cloud and engineering roles.
Getting started
For people considering becoming a software developer, from a technical skills perspective, the barrier to entry is getting lower.
Nathaniel Okenwa, developer evangelist at Twilio, said programming languages are now more beginner-friendly. “Previously, you were dropped in at the deep end with C++,” he said.
A programming language like C++ is generally regarded as quite unwieldy for beginners.
Okenwa said the pace of digital innovation offers school-leavers “a great opportunity” to join the tech sector, and that people who want to be on such a path who are either choosing A-level subjects or have recently received their results should consider the opportunity offered by AI and explore how they can use it to help “build the future”.
Writing code with AI
OpenAI positions its latest model, GPT-5, as being well-suited to coding. “We’re entering the era of ‘vibe coding’, where developers describe a problem and AI writes the code,” said Okenwa.
This makes the creation of software more accessible. However, while such tools can help writing code a lot easier, he added that “human developers are still essential”.
“AI is great at doing, but not at understanding context, empathy or ethical implications,” said Okenwa. “That’s where human developers shine.”
In his experience, people are still needed to test, guide and refine AI outputs. Okenwa said this will result in many new jobs emerging to support the AI-based code generators.
Okenwa urges people looking to build a career in software development to focus on being an expert.
Given that AI is becoming more and more capable of taking on programming work, he recommended that software developers pivot towards understanding how they can build software on top of the code that is generated by an AI-based code generator.
Okenwa suggested they could also consider jobs that involve building the guardrails AI needs to follow. “While the job title may change, I don’t think that people will disappear from software development,” he added.
Instead, Okenwa said they will gain new skills that will allow companies to build new experiences.
Enterprise IT
For graduates who are now leaving university with degrees that include software engineering and programming, working in enterprise IT can be a big culture shock.
“At university, we’re not building apps that can scale to millions and billions of people, so we often don’t necessarily need to have scalability as a priority,” said Okenwa. “This is why it is important to get some experience or to at least be around people who have those experiences.”
This experience is not only something that can be gleaned from working in large enterprises. Many open source project maintainers are eager to have people who can contribute code, which may offer new software engineers a way to dabble in coding if they are struggling to find a full-time job. He noted that working in the open source community also means the people who contribute code need to follow a lot of the same safeguards and guardrails of enterprise software development.
As the data from the ONS and Tecnovy’s study illustrate, software engineering is a sought-after skill that offers the potential for people to earn higher than the national average. The role of software engineering and software development in enterprise IT is likely to evolve as AI code generation becomes embedded in the process of writing code.
The introduction of GPT-5 shows the direction of travel for the use of AI for programming enterprise applications.
AI-based code generation will continually improve, and people who want to ensure they remain relevant as software developers need to understand the value they can bring to software development. And, as Okenwa points out, these AI coders cannot replicate the unique traits of humans that will be essential as organisations look to their software developer teams to build more meaningful digital experiences.
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