Why context engineering is AI’s next hiring challenge
Context engineering is becoming AI hiring's real skills gap
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/tobie-morgan-hitchcock · TechRadarOpinion By Tobie Morgan Hitchcock Published 5 August 2026
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Prompt engineering was briefly the face of the AI jobs boom.
In 2025, technology recruitment firm SPG Resourcing reported that UK job listings for AI prompt engineers had grown by 180% over the previous year.
It was an eye-catching figure that captured the mood of the first commercial wave of generative AI. Businesses were trying to understand how to talk to LLMs and turn early experiments into something useful.
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That requirement has not disappeared.
Tobie Morgan Hitchcock
CEO & Co-Founder of SurrealDB.
With job site postings for specialist AI roles in the UK rising by 61% from last year according to PWC, it’s clear that good prompts still matter. But most of that new demand is for people who can apply AI inside a business, not just talk to a model.
Many organizations have moved past the first demo. They are now trying to build AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and AI-enabled workflows that operate inside the business.
That creates a different skills gap.
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