Coffee & Data – April 2025

Your monthly brew of updates on UK data trends, hiring, and career growth.

👋🏼 Hello Data People, here we are again!

The first quarter is out of the way, and if you are reading this, I'm sure you have eyes and ears open trying to spot what's happening with the job market and how to navigate an incredibly complex job market.

But in this issue, I’ll break down what’s happening behind the scenes, and what to do about it.

Here's what we're going to cover

✅ The UK Data Job Market in April

✅ AI and Data Trends – What’s shaping data jobs now

✅ Special Focus: "The Rise of AI Literacy as a Must-Have Skill in Data Roles"

✅ Candidate Space – Interview Preparation: Smarter Than Ever (Using AI Properly)

✅ Stats & News – Key April updates from the UK and Europe

Let's go!

1. Quiet Hiring, Loud Innovation - The Status of the UK Data Job Market in April

April has been an unusual month (once again) in the wider job market, but the UK data hiring market is cautiously rebuilding itself.

Here’s what April looked like:

😮 Data-related roles made up ~14.8% of all new UK job postings this month.

📈 Contract roles in analytics and data engineering rose by 18% in Q1 2025 compared to Q4 2024.

🚨 Permanent hiring is selective as companies are mainly filling urgent roles tied to profitability, AI implementation, or digital transformation.

🛍️ Retail, media, and tech-driven businesses are finally restarting to hire, focusing on candidates who combine technical skills with stakeholder and commercial awareness.

Across the board, hiring remains very cautious given what's happening in the world.

For instance, a couple of clients I'm working with had to freeze recruitment to understand the impact tariffs had on their operations.

It's not all frozen, but definitely selective. Companies are hiring more quietly, often filling roles through internal moves, AI upgrades *🤕, backfills, contract hires, or fractional leadership. Large expansion hiring plans are not as common nowadays.

But I'm seeing one important big trend: companies starting interviews now are showing stronger intent to close hires quickly, they don’t want long hiring processes anymore.

If you’re hunting for a job, patience and preparation are still essential, but the odds have definitely improved compared to January and February.

Stay visible by applying to jobs and networking, focus on quality applications, and mostly, keep interviews happening.

🚀 Innovation instead? Anything but quiet.

Some examples of what I heard people in my network are building, or working with:

• AI pilots are becoming real projects, and AI tools are booming. (I have been hearing about several different use cases)

• Marketing measurement tools are currently being rebuilt to help brands with the post-cookie world.

• Open-source solutions in analytics, cloud, and AI are gaining real momentum inside UK and European businesses.

We’re seeing companies that stayed conservative in 2024 now rushing to adapt.

The demand for better data skills teams busy behind the scenes. I've hired several engineers, scientists or technical analysts lately.

Talking about engineering and data science, AI deserves a separate chapter...

2. AI and Data Trends – April 2025 Snapshot

What has been trending lately? We can't talk about this without mentioning AI, of course, as is reshaping the data world faster than ever.

First, we've talked about this in previous editions, but now we are seeing major players finally adding their copilots.

🤖 AI co-pilots are now expected from users paying big £££

• Microsoft 365 Copilot is expanding its spread.

• Power BI Copilot is gaining traction for faster dashboard generation.

• Tableau’s Ask Data is making it easier to query insights with natural language.

Many data professionals are now expected to use AI tools to increase productivity per head.

🧹 Smaller AI models are growing

I've heard more and more data professionals building their own models, which have big advantages.

Instead of relying only on massive expensive LLMs, companies are experimenting with domain-specific small models for faster, cheaper, more relevant AI solutions.

This helps companies being more focused, whilst also solving some of the biggest concerns, privacy and costs.

🔍 AI quality control is critical

Human oversight is becoming part of every AI workflow.

Data teams are expected to validate AI outputs, spot hallucinations, and steer the final narrative. Going a tiny bit into the future, I've read this interesting article from Microsoft's future of work report, which says that in the future, we'll manage a team of AI agents. How much of that will be true? 👀

🎯 My takeaway?

AI literacy is no longer a nice-to-have, the faster you learn, practice and embed AI into your work, the less you're going to be replaceable!

And talking about AI literacy...

3. AI Literacy: A Must-Have Skill for Data Roles

I believe that the biggest shift in data hiring right now is mindset.

I've seen hiring managers being traditional about it, and the opposite.

The traditionalist one conducts interviews like before, any mention of analysts using AI to help them with coding is seen as them not being good enough for the role.

The progressive one instead, raises a figurative red flag if the candidate doesn't mention AI, as they think they're not innovative enough.

So how should candidates and hiring managers behave? 🤌🏻

Companies today expect analysts, insight managers, and even early-career data scientists to use AI tools smartly.

I believe AI literacy and how it should be assess is about the following points:

✅ Knowing when to trust AI outputs, and when not to.

✅ Using AI to speed up analysis, reporting, research without replacing critical thinking.

✅ Building better prompts to get clearer, more relevant results.

✅ Integrating AI insights into business outcomes instead of using AI for the sake of it.

✅ Using AI to assess your code and give you feedback on how to do it better and more effectively.

In short: in 2025, AI isn’t replacing analysts, but analysts who use AI effectively will replace those who don’t. 💁🏼

4. Candidate Space – Interview Preparation: Smarter Than Ever (Using AI properly)

I promise you that after you'll read about this, the way you'll prepare for interviews will change forever. But before then, I want to show a powerful picture.

It doesn't matter if you land an interview because you apply through a job board, a recruiter reaches out of you have the warmest referral in the world. You will always have to do an interview to land a new role.

Landing interviews is one of the toughest things to do, so let's not waste this really good achievement having a mediocre interview preparation.

It’s not enough to be good, you need to be prepared in a smarter way than ever.

Earlier this month, I posted a YouTube video about it:

👉🏼 The Secret AI Tool That's REVOLUTIONIZING Job Interview Prep

In the video, I explain:

• How to get AI to create realistic interview questions for your role.

• How to train yourself by simulating realistic interview conditions.

• How to improve your real-world examples (STAR format) by pressure-testing them.

• How to create a fantastic, engaging podcast you can hear on the go which gets you in the best place ever before your interview.

⚠️ Important: This isn’t about cheating.

It’s about training like an athlete, simulating the real conditions you’ll face, so that you’re calm, fast, and sharp when the real interview happens.

Using AI properly for interview prep can help you research the company extensively, identify your weak spots and practice storytelling or perfecting your answers to technical questions.

I've heard far too many hiring managers complain candidates don't come to interview prepared, so this can make a huge impact, especially if you're time poor or don't have much interview practice.

6. Stats & News – April Highlights

📰 Big news this month:

• OpenAI launched GPT-5 preview - with stronger reasoning and security features. Major impact expected across analytics tools.

• Google postponed third-party cookie removal (again), delaying disruption for marketing analytics teams.

• Brands target AI chatbots for higher visibility as users switch from Google search. SEO is about to change forever!

• Microsoft's CEO admits 20% to 30% of their code is written with AI, which is a big revelation!

📈And some more interesting stats...

• ⚡ OpenAI’s GPT usage in enterprise tools grew by 41% in Q1 2025 - Which is a massive increase!

• ♟️Based on Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 60% of UK data professionals now use AI tools (like Copilot or ChatGPT) weekly in their workflow

• 🧠 70% of surveyed data leaders said they now expect candidates to demonstrate some level of AI literacy in interviews (Internal insights from 3Search data)

• 🛠️ Usage of AI-based productivity tools in data teams has increased by 37% YoY according to research from Gartner,

• 🧑💻 Candidates who listed AI tools on their CV were 43% more likely to be shortlisted for interviews (still based on 3Search data)

To finalise...

April wasn’t explosive (Sadly) but it was steady, quiet moves, deeper innovation, smarter preparation.

The job opportunities are coming back for sure, but they’ll go to those who are ready, visible, and skilled at using the new tools the right way.

On a personal note...

A few days ago I celebrated 3 years working at 3Search, and in the first 3 years I've been in recruitment I've seen three completely different job markets. Experienced colleagues say everything is cyclical, so hopefully we'll get to see a fantastic booming job market soon 👀

If you got here, thank you for reading, means a lot to me!

If you found this edition useful, feel free to like, comment, or share it with someone who loves data as much as you do.

➡️ What should we cover next month?

Drop me a message, your ideas help shape future issues.

See you in May ! ☕