We talk to a lot of Brighton employers — partners, prospects, the network we've built over a decade. Over the last three months we've had ~50 conversations specifically about hiring plans for the rest of 2026. This is what those conversations look like aggregated.
Who's hiring
Two clusters: established digital agencies (10–80 people) and product/SaaS startups (5–40 people). The agencies are hiring marketing, content, and account roles; the startups are hiring developers, product, and growth.
What's quiet: traditional creative agencies (graphic design, print, branding-only). Those have consolidated significantly in the last two years.
Skills in demand
Practical AI fluency is now the most-mentioned skill across both clusters. Not "AI engineer" — that's a separate, smaller market. We mean: marketers who use AI in their daily workflow, content creators who use it to draft and edit, developers who pair with it.
Beyond AI: GA4 fluency (still surprisingly rare), paid social with proper attribution (also rare), and modern JavaScript on the dev side. The skills market has moved faster than the trained-graduate market in all three.
Salaries (2026, Brighton)
Junior digital marketing: £24–28k. Mid: £32–42k. Senior: £50–65k.
Junior developer: £30–35k. Mid: £45–55k. Senior: £65–80k.
These are noticeably tighter at the senior end than London but more competitive at the junior end — because Brighton has more cost-of-living headroom, and most juniors don't want to commute to London.
The recruitment problem
Almost everyone we speak to has the same complaint: the mid-junior tier (2–4 years experience) is impossible. Agency recruiters either don't have candidates or they're pricing them at near-senior. The candidates themselves know they have leverage and they're using it.
Several employers have stopped recruiting at that level entirely and switched to apprenticeships + internal promotion. That's the pattern we've watched develop most over the last 18 months.
What 2026 looks like
We expect more of the same. Continued tightness at mid-junior. More AI-fluent juniors entering the market (from us and from the wider Brighton training ecosystem). Salaries flat to slightly up. Hybrid working settling at 2-3 days in office for most employers, fully remote for a smaller group.
The one wildcard is the broader UK skills shortage policy. There's noise about a possible non-levy SME funding bump and noise about levy reform. Neither was concrete enough to plan around as of May 2026.