Hiring junior developers in the UK should be one of the easiest ways to fix the skills gap. Plenty of people want a way into tech and plenty of small businesses have work that needs doing. Yet when I look at what it actually takes for a small firm to bring someone in at the bottom, the whole thing feels designed by people who have never run a payroll.
I have been building software for over 17 years and I have hired, mentored and occasionally lost good people along the way. I also sit on the board of two companies, so I see this from both ends. The message from government is always that we need more skills. The experience on the ground says something very different.
The Junior Developer Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
A junior developer costs real money before they earn any. Someone senior has to review their work, answer questions and put right the odd mistake that reaches production. In a team of three, that is a serious chunk of your best person's week.
Big companies absorb that cost without noticing. A small business feels it immediately, because every hour spent mentoring is an hour not spent shipping. So when money gets tight, the junior role is the first one to go and the first one nobody advertises.
Why Graduates Struggle to Get Started
The result is a strange market. Every job advert asks for two or three years of experience, and the people who could give that experience cannot afford to. A graduate with a decent degree is stuck applying for roles that quietly require them to have already done the job.
I have seen very capable people give up on tech entirely because nobody would take a chance on them. That is a waste for them and a waste for the businesses that desperately need developers.
How Employment Costs Make It Worse
Every policy change that raises the cost of employing someone hits the entry level hardest. A junior salary is small, but the on costs, the pension, the equipment, the software licences and the management time all pile up around it. I wrote about the numbers in my piece on the employer National Insurance rise and what it costs small tech businesses, and the honest conclusion is that the maths for taking on a trainee has got tighter.
When the margin is thin, a business does the sensible thing and hires one experienced person or uses a contractor instead. Nobody is being cruel here. It is just arithmetic, and policy that ignores the arithmetic gets the opposite of what it intended.
Apprenticeships Are Not Built for Small Firms
Apprenticeships are the obvious answer and I like the idea a lot. In practice the paperwork, the training provider requirements and the off the job hours are a heavy lift for a company with five people. Large employers have an HR team to deal with all that and often a levy pot that has to be spent anyway.
A small business has the founder doing it on a Sunday night. I went through the detail in my article on the Growth and Skills Levy and what it means for small tech businesses, and the pattern is the same. The schemes are fine on paper and clumsy for the people who most need them.
What Actually Works When You Hire a Junior
Moaning about policy only gets you so far, so here is what I have found works when you decide to take someone on regardless. It will not fix the system, but it will fix your own hiring.
Hire for Attitude and Real Projects
Forget the degree classification and look at what someone has built. A small side project, a half finished app or a contribution to something open source tells you far more than a CV. Ask them to talk you through a bug they got stuck on, because how they describe it shows how they think.
Give Them a Proper First Ninety Days
Do not throw a junior in at the deep end and hope. Give them a small, real feature in the first fortnight, pair them with someone patient and set clear expectations about what good looks like. The firms that lose juniors are almost always the ones that gave them no structure.
Keep the Scope Small and Ship Something
Early wins matter more than people admit. A junior who ships a useful change in week three feels like part of the team. One who spends two months on a sandbox exercise starts looking at other jobs.
What the Government Should Do Instead
I am not asking for a handout. I am asking for policy that treats small employers as the main route into work rather than an afterthought. Here is what I would do.
First, make the first hire of any kind cheaper in the first year, with a simple relief that does not need an accountant to claim. Second, strip the paperwork out of apprenticeships for firms under a certain size, with one page to sign and one named contact who picks up the phone. Third, fund proper mentoring time, because that is the real cost, not the salary.
Small firms employ a huge share of the workforce and train a lot of people informally. Back that properly and you get more skilled people faster than any new national programme. It is the same point I keep making in my piece on why UK small business policy keeps failing entrepreneurs. Build things for the businesses that actually exist.
Where This Leaves You
If you run a small business, do not wait for the system to get better. Hire the junior you can afford, give them structure and treat mentoring as an investment you will get back within a year. I have never regretted taking on someone keen who was willing to learn.
If you are a junior trying to get in, build something real and show it. The market is tough, but small firms still notice people who ship things and ask good questions. And if you are working out whether to hire at all, this is exactly the kind of decision I help founders think through, and I cover plenty of it in The 28 Day Startup.
