What the rise of practical jobs says about skills, employability and opportunity in the age of AI

As the UK’s labour market remains cool, Indeed’s latest Opportunity Index shows that opportunity has not disappeared, but it is no longer evenly spread. Instead, opportunity is increasingly concentrated in roles built around practical skills, specialist expertise, and work that relies on human judgement and interaction. That shift matters, because it tells us where the labour market is actually holding up.

This does not signal a return to broad-based hiring. Employers remain cautious. What the data suggest is a shift in where opportunity sits, with demand clustering around jobs that are hard to automate, linked to long-term economic priorities, or grounded in skills that can be applied directly in real workplaces.

Where opportunity is holding up

The Opportunity Index for 2026 points to demand across a wide range of roles. That in itself is telling. No single sector dominates. Instead, opportunity spans skilled trades, construction, health and wellbeing, sustainability-linked occupations and a narrower group of specialist technology roles.

Practical, site-based jobs feature strongly. Building inspectors, HGV technicians, plumbing engineers and fire stoppers all rank highly. These are not new roles. Their prominence reflects steady, structural demand shaped by infrastructure investment, tighter safety regulation and the ongoing realities of building and maintenance. Their resilience is a reminder that experience, applied skills and sound judgement remain hard to replace.

Alongside these roles sit highly specialised technology positions, including principal software engineers and machine-learning engineers, reflecting a market that increasingly values depth of expertise.

Opportunity is shaped less by job titles or sectors and more by what people can demonstrably do.

Alignment with skills priorities

This pattern closely mirrors the direction set out by Skills England in its priorities for 2025–26 and its longer-term outlook to 2030, particularly around construction, engineering, clean energy, digital capability and health-related sectors.

The Opportunity Index reinforces this from the employer side. Trade and construction roles align with priorities around housing delivery and infrastructure renewal. Sustainability-linked occupations, such as renewable-energy engineers, reflect the expansion of clean-energy generation and retrofit activity. Specialist digital roles point to continued demand for advanced technical skills linked to AI and data.

Importantly, these opportunities span a wide range of qualification levels. Some require advanced technical training. Others rely on vocational, technical and applied routes into work. This supports a growing policy emphasis on technical education and vocational pathways alongside higher education, rather than treating them as secondary or temporary options.

Implications for young people and the economically inactive

This emerging picture matters in the context of persistent concern about youth employment and economic inactivity. In the UK, 13.7% of those aged 16 to 24 are unemployed.

The Opportunity Index does not show who is accessing these roles, or who is being left out. But it does indicate where opportunity is appearing. Many of the practical occupations highlighted share common features: they are skills-led rather than qualification-led, depend on job-specific competence, and often offer clearer routes from training into work.

For young people who struggle to access traditional graduate pathways, this reinforces the importance of visible vocational routes, strong employer engagement and high-quality technical training. Practical roles can offer more direct entry points into the labour market, but only if they are supported by systems that enable progression rather than trapping people at entry level.

Practical work in the age of AI

The continued strength of practical roles also reflects how technology is reshaping work. Indeed’s research on AI at work suggests that generative AI is more likely to change how jobs are done than to replace them outright. Only a small share of skills analysed are currently considered fully replaceable.

Jobs that require physical presence, manual execution or sustained human interaction remain among the least exposed to deep automation. In these roles, AI is more likely to support routine or administrative tasks than to replace core work, which helps explain why hands-on occupations continue to show up strongly in measures of opportunity.

Specialist digital roles, meanwhile, are changing rather than disappearing. AI is reshaping software and data work in ways that increase the importance of oversight, judgement and domain knowledge. The ability to adapt and apply expertise in context is becoming more valuable than narrow technical specialism alone.

What this means for skills policy and employability

Taken together, the Opportunity Index and AI research point to a labour market in which opportunity is increasingly tied to relevance, application and adaptability. Demand is strongest where skills are clearly defined, difficult to automate, or aligned with long-term priorities such as infrastructure, sustainability and advanced digital capability.

For policymakers, skills bodies and education providers, this reinforces the case for systems that support multiple routes into work, recognise technical and vocational pathways, and enable progression over time. As roles continue to evolve, modular training, employer-led standards and lifelong learning become less optional and more structural.

For individuals, the message is not that one type of work is replacing another. Rather, employability is increasingly shaped by practical capability and transferable skills. The rise of practical jobs is not a step backwards. It reflects how labour markets are adapting to technological change and where opportunity is most likely to endure, whether or not the next wave of technology delivers what it promises.

By Matt Burney, Senior Strategic Advisor, Indeed