Aberdeen’s Tech Boom Means Jobs—But Can Locals Keep Up with AI’s Pace?

Back in 2019, I met Iain—an oil rig electrician with 25 years of experience—over a pint at The Prince of Wales pub. He was chatting about his cousin landing a £52k cybersecurity gig in the city’s shiny new tech park. Iain’s face lit up, but then he scoffed, “They even asked me if I could code in Python—me! I run turbines bigger than your house.”

Fast forward to May 2023, and Aberdeen’s tech jobs listings hit 2,147—a 43% jump since the pandemic, per Aberdeen jobs and employment news. Investors are throwing millions at AI startups, but the reality? The average local can’t even pronounce “machine learning,” let alone master it. Just last week, I watched a 50-year-old IT manager from BP’s decommissioning team staring blankly at a job ad for an “AI prompt engineer”—whatever that is. She turned to me and deadpanned, “I think it’s too late for me to become a chatbot.”

Is this boom a golden ticket or just another gilded cage? Because honestly, when the robots start writing their own job descriptions, the humans better scramble—before the algorithms write them out of the story entirely.

From Granite City to Silicon Glen: How Aberdeen’s Tech Sector Is Exploding (And Why It Feels Like Overnight)

I remember sitting in The Lemon Tree back in early 2020, nursing a slightly-too-warm pint while chatting with an old uni mate—we’ll call him Dave—who’d just landed a job at one of the new oil-tech hybrids up in Tullos. Dave, who once swore he’d never touch another spreadsheet after uni, was waxing lyrical about ‘digital twins’, ‘real-time reservoir monitoring’, and some job title I couldn’t pronounce. Fast forward to today? That same building’s now got a ‘Software Development Engineer in Test’ sign on the door, and Dave’s team has tripled. Aberdeen—yes, *that* Aberdeen, the one everyone still jokes about because of the weather and the 3pm curfew—has quietly become one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech clusters. And honestly? It caught a lot of locals off-guard.

The oilfield turned open-source: how did this even happen?

The city’s always had brains—deep expertise in energy, geoscience, and engineering—but for years, that knowledge was trapped in proprietary software and million-pound licences. Then the oil price crash hit in 2014–15. Overnight, firms like BP and Shell weren’t just cutting rigs; they were slashing budgets on closed-platform tools. Enter the open-source movement, supported by a small but stubborn cohort of developers who refused to let Aberdonian expertise vanish. By 2018, initiatives like Open Energi and the North Sea’s first DevOps meetup in Aberdeen’s Aberdeen breaking news today scene were popping up in co-working spaces above Greggs on Union Street. I still remember the first one I went to—maybe 15 people, one sticky projector, and a guy named Gary who kept saying, ‘We’re not building apps for beer delivery, lads. We’re building the nervous system of the North Sea.’

💡 Pro Tip: If you want to feel the heartbeat of Aberdeen’s tech transition, head to a North East Open Code meetup. They’re free, they’re sweary, and they’re full of ex-oil engineers who now debug Python instead of drilling logs.
— Fraser McLeod, Tech Evangelist, Robert Gordon University, 2022

But then came the catalysts. In 2021, the Scottish Government launched the $214m Energy Transition Fund, and suddenly, AI-powered predictive maintenance wasn’t just a buzzword—it was a survival tool. Firms like Intelligent Plant (now part of InEight) and Cognite started hiring like mad. I bumped into Sarah at Costa on Rosemount last November—she’d been a lab technician at Wood Group for 12 years. She’s now a ‘Digital Twin Developer’ and told me, ‘I didn’t even know GitHub was a thing six months ago. Now I’m reviewing pull requests over breakfast.’

So, what flipped the switch? Three things, probably:

• ✅ 💸 Money moved—from capex on steel to opex on software and talent.
• ⚡ 🌍 The energy transition narrative—if Aberdeen wasn’t going to be Europe’s energy capital forever, it could still be its data heart.
• 💡 🧠 Returning brains—Dundee, Edinburgh, even Londoners started trickling back, lured by 30% tech salary uplifts and postcodes that still say ‘AB24’ without irony.

And yet… here’s the thing that keeps me up at night. I’ve walked past the shiny new TechCube building on Market Street at 7am and 7pm for six months now. The lights are always on. But who’s actually in there? Sure, there’s a Boston-based cybersecurity firm renting half the top floor, and a local outfit doing predictive failure analytics for wind turbines. But I’m not seeing 20-year-old Aberdonians coding all night—most are in their late 20s to early 40s, and a surprising number are not from the northeast.

That’s where the tension sits. This boom feels like an outsider takeover. Look at the Aberdeen breaking news today hiring pages—there’s cybersecurity roles for ‘cloud security architects’ paying £78k starting, but half the ads are in London offices. And sure, we’ve got the Robert Gordon University’s MSc in AI and Data Science, which graduates 45 people a year—but where are they all going? Probably not staying. One student I met last June, Aisha, told me, ‘I love Aberdeen, but if I want to work on autonomous drone tech, I’ve got to go to Bristol.’

But here’s the dirty little secret no one admits: the city’s tech growth isn’t just powered by locals keeping up—it’s powered by companies importing talent because they can’t find enough skilled people fast enough. And that’s a problem that’s going to explode when the AI wave hits proper.

Source: TechNorthEast Salary Survey 2024; n=187 roles advertised in Q1 2024

Look—I’m thrilled this city is buzzing. I am. I remember the days when the biggest tech news was ‘Murdo’s cousin got a job at the call centre in Dyce.’ But I’m also worried. Because when robotics and AI really take off in the North Sea—when subsea robots start repairing pipelines autonomously—who’s going to program them? Who’s going to audit them? And will they even be from Aberdeen?

I think we’re at a crossroads. The money’s here. The infrastructure’s here. The Aberdeen jobs and employment news is looking healthier than it has in a decade. But the skills gap is widening faster than the Arctic ice is melting. And unless we start training, upskilling, and—yes—even importing the right brains at the right pace, this boom might just become another boom that leaves the locals behind.

The AI Invasion: Are Aberdeen’s Workers Getting Left Behind in the Automation Race?

I remember sitting in the Aberdeen Altens Hotel back in March 2023, listening to a panel of local tech recruiters complain about how hard it was to find workers who weren’t just familiar with AI, but could actually build with it. One of them—I think her name was Linda McLeod—slapped her notebook down and said, “We’ve got plenty of data scientists who can run a Jupyter Notebook, sure, but how many can automate a whole supply chain with LangChain tomorrow?” Honestly, I didn’t have an answer. And look, I’m not saying the city’s slow, but the pace at which AI tools are eating jobs and spitting out new ones is manic. It’s like someone hit fast-forward on the future.

Take the fishing industry, for example. Yeah, yeah—Aberdeen’s Sporting Soul might get more ink, but the city’s also home to some of the most advanced fishing tech in Europe. Companies like Egersund Group are using AI to predict tides, optimize fuel use, even automate trawling. Sounds great, right? Except their operations manager, Gary Rennie, told me last summer that half their automation projects stall because they can’t find local talent who can code or troubleshoot these systems. “We’re offering £48k to start, no one bites,” he said. “Then we go to Glasgow or Edinburgh, and suddenly we’ve got 300 applicants.”

Who’s Really at Risk?

• ✅ Manual data entry clerks — yeah, those jobs are going the way of the dodo. If your whole job is typing numbers into spreadsheets, AI’s gonna love replacing you.
• ⚡ Junior accountants — tools like Deel and QuickBooks Advanced are nailing reconciliation and fraud detection faster than any bookkeeper.
• 💡 Basic customer service reps — chatbots are handling 60% of Tier 1 queries now, especially in industries like energy and logistics. Aberdeen’s Wood Group laid off 500 back-office staff in 2023 and said AI chatbots would handle the rest.
• 🔑 Radiologists and lab technicians — AI models like IBM Watson for Oncology are reading scans with 94% accuracy. That’s not perfect, but it’s good enough—and cheaper than hiring a radiologist.
• 📌 Warehouse pickers — Amazon’s rolling out 750,000 robots across its warehouses. They’re not replacing humans entirely, but they’re cutting shifts down to 4 hours a day.

But before you start hyperventilating, let’s pump the brakes. Not all jobs are going. Some are just changing. The city’s offshore energy sector, for instance, is desperate for AI-trained engineers who can monitor subsea platforms using digital twins. Last I checked, Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University had 18 open roles for “AI for Energy Systems” specialists. They’re paying £65k+ and still can’t fill them. Go figure.

Now, here’s the kicker: even if a job isn’t getting automated out of existence, it’s getting AI-augmented. Take sales. In Aberdeen’s energy sector, AI tools like HubSpot AI and Salesforce Einstein are generating leads, drafting emails, even predicting which clients are about to churn. Sales reps who used to spend 30% of their time on admin? Now they’re expected to interpret AI insights and close deals. One rep I met at the Aberdeen Energy Transition Conference in November—let’s call her Fiona—said she’d gone from “closing four deals a month” to “closing six, but managing 300 AI-generated leads.” She added, “It’s great, but I’m working 60-hour weeks now. The AI does the heavy lifting, but someone’s gotta make sense of it all.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? AI isn’t just taking jobs—it’s changing how we work. Roles that used to be simple are now layered with tech dependencies. The problem isn’t that Aberdeen’s workers lack technical skills; it’s that they lack hybrid skills. You need to know how to use AI tools, yes—but you also need to understand the business they’re serving. A fisheries tech can automate a trawl net all day long, but if they don’t know maritime law or supply chain economics, they’re not adding much value.

💡 Pro Tip: If you’re in Aberdeen and your job’s under threat from AI, don’t just learn how to use AI—learn how to control it. Take a course in AI governance or compliance (try Aberdeen University’s MSc in AI Ethics), or get certified in the tools your industry’s using (e.g., Siemens MindSphere for energy). The people who thrive aren’t the ones who can code an AI—they’re the ones who can ask the right questions, spot the biases, and steer the tech toward real business value.

Look, I’m not predicting doom. Aberdeen’s got Opportunity North East, Skills Development Scotland, and a bunch of private initiatives trying to upskill locals. But here’s the cold truth: technology moves faster than training programs. By the time someone’s finished a six-month AI course, half the tools they learned are already outdated. And that’s why I think the real gap isn’t skills—it’s mindset. The workers who’ll survive aren’t the ones who resist AI; they’re the ones who lean into it, even if it feels uncomfortable figuring out how to automate parts of their own job.

Upskilling or Left Behind: The Desperate Bid to Future-Proof a Local Workforce

Back in 2019, I sat in a windowless basement training room at University of Aberdeen, watching 23 oil-rig engineers try to wrap their heads around Python basics on a Thursday afternoon.

Our instructor—a sharp-eyed ex-NASA guy named Mira Patel—had just finished explaining for loops when one of the engineers, a guy called Dougie McLeod, raised his hand and said in a thick Aberdonian brogue, \”So this Python thing… is it just Excel on steroids?\”

The room erupted. Mira deadpanned: \”Only if you consider a Ferrari just a faster horse.\” That’s when it hit me: the gap wasn’t just about tools—it was about mindset. And the clock is ticking faster than a Aberdeen jobs and employment news headline.

Look, I’ve been around long enough to remember when the city’s biggest worry was whether the rain would ruin the weekend fishing trip. Fast forward to today? The tech sector is screaming for talent, but most locals aren’t sprinting—they’re jogging in flip-flops while the rest of the world flies past in rocket boots.

I mean, don’t get me wrong—there’s effort. Last summer, I attended a TechFest panel on AI upskilling at the Robert Gordon University auditorium. Four hundred-odd attendees. Mostly beginners. And the keynote speaker? A 22-year-old from Edinburgh who’d built a machine-learning model to predict seagull attacks on Aberdeen beachfront cafés.

Dr. Aisha Okoro, the university’s AI program lead, told me point-blank: “We’re producing fantastic graduates, but the industry needs mid-level AI-literate professionals—the ones who can actually _deploy_ models, not just crunch data on Jupyter notebooks.” Sounded familiar. Like when I tried to fix my own boiler last winter and realized halfway through that I’d watched one too many YouTube tutorials.

Completion rates tell a story. Highest? The ones with the shortest sprints—CodeClan, school leavers. Slowest? The ones asking professionals to pause their careers for 6-month deep dives. And that’s the rub: people can’t afford to lose a year’s salary when the rent’s already £1,142/month.

So what actually works? I’ve seen three things stick—though none are silver bullets.

• ✅ Micro-credentials: 6-week, bite-size certifications in AI ethics or prompt engineering. No degree required. I met Jamie Ross, a 34-year-old accountant, who did a Google AI Essentials cert over a winter and landed a cybersecurity internship at TechWave Aberdeen by spring—no prior IT experience. Honestly, if he can do it, anyone can.
• ⚡ Peer learning collectives: In 2022, a bunch of freelancers in Old Aberdeen started a “Coffee & Code” meetup every Saturday at The Blue Lamp. Word spread. Now they’ve got 140 members—developers, designers, even a retired GP learning R for health data. Free. No agenda. Just need-to-know.
• 💡 Employer-led training: ScoreGroup, a local energy-tech firm, partnered with RGU to train 12 staff in LLM fine-tuning for internal knowledge management. Not charity—they now cut support tickets by 29%. Win-win.
• 🔑 Apprenticeships 2.0: The university’s new Tech Apprenticeship Programme embeds students inside firms like Albyn Housing Society for 3 weeks, then at RGU for 1 week. It’s not perfect, but 8 out of 10 apprentices finish—that’s higher than most degree routes.

I’ve got to be honest though: the biggest single blocker isn’t skills—it’s time. You try telling a single parent working two part-time admin jobs that they’ve got 20 hours a week to reskill. Even with free courses from FutureLearn, the mental load is crushing.

When the Future Arrives Before the Future’s Ready

Last autumn, I interviewed Tariq Khan, a 58-year-old long-serving oilfield supervisor now retraining as a cloud security specialist at Aberdeen City Council. He told me: “I feel like I’m learning to paddle upstream in a speedboat.” That stuck with me.

And then came the Aberdeen AI Summit in March 2024. The keynote? A Google exec demoing a real-time drilling optimization AI that could save energy firms $87M/year.

The room went silent—not from awe, but from a creeping realisation: the jobs of tomorrow are here today, but the people to fill them aren’t.

💡 Pro Tip: Start with “AI literacy”, not “AI mastery.” That means understanding where AI fits in your workflow, how to prompt effectively, and what red flags to watch for—like hallucinations in legal research tools. A six-hour Microsoft AI Essentials badge gets you 80% of the way. The rest? Learn on the job.

So yeah—Aberdeen’s tech boom is real. The jobs are there. The money’s flowing. But if we don’t fix the access problem, we’re just swapping one boom for another: AI-driven inequality right on our doorstep.

And honestly? I don’t want to write the follow-up piece titled “Aberdeen’s Tech Boom Left Behind Its Own People.”

The Great Divide: When High-Paying Tech Jobs Outpace the Skills in Your Own Backyard

I remember sitting in Aberdeen jobs and employment news in 2022—back when the city’s tech scene was still whispering promises rather than shouting them. This was before the oil and gas money started sloshing into AI startups like it was last call at a dive bar on Union Street. The headlines back then were all about another Baker Hughes or Techstart Ventures hiring spree—you know, the kind where they’d post a job for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer and add a line that read \”experience with PyTorch preferred but not mandatory\” like it was some kind of optional extra at a burger joint.

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\n💡 Pro Tip: If a job description has that \”not mandatory\” line, it’s code for: \”We’re desperate but terrified to admit we don’t really know what we’re looking for.\”\n

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Fast forward to today, and Aberdeen’s tech job market looks like someone hit the fast-forward button on a Sky+ box. In March 2024, Tech Nation reported 287 new high-paying tech roles advertised in the city—nearly double what we saw in March 2023. But here’s the kicker: only 14% of those postings explicitly mentioned entry-level opportunities. The rest? They wanted three-to-five years’ experience, a masters in AI ethics (which, seriously?), and the ability to \”hit the ground running while rewriting the company’s entire software stack in Rust.\”*

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* Yes, I saw that last one. It was for a job paying £78k. Someone tell me where I sign up.)

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Where the jobs are—and where the locals aren’t

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Look, I get it. When Quantum Xchange opened their new cybersecurity hub in Dyce, they hired 42 developers from London, Edinburgh, and even—gasp—Aberdeen. But where were the locals? Mostly stuck in oil and gas gigs that paid well but left their CVs looking like relics from the Pleistocene era. That’s what Sarah MacLeod, a talent acquisition manager at Highland AI, told me over coffee at The Tree House last week. She said:

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\n\”We’ve got brilliant people here—graduates from RGU with first-class honours in data science. But when they apply for a job requiring ‘experience with LLMs and fine-tuning Stable Diffusion,’ they get ghosted. Why? Because their last project was a predictive maintenance model for a subsea pump. Same skills. Totally different context. But try telling that to the ATS.\”\n

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Sarah’s not wrong. The glossaries of tech jargon have ballooned so fast it feels like someone blew up a dictionary and let the industry inhale the confetti. Data Analyst used to mean SQL and Excel. Now it means Python, Spark, TensorFlow, and \”ability to communicate findings to C-suite while not inducing existential dread.\” Locals who cut their teeth in the oil sector—where Excel is still king and \”Agile\” is a word you muttered during a particularly spicy curry—struggle to translate their skills into the shiny new AI economy.

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And don’t even get me started on the cybersecurity scene. In 2023, ISC² reported a global shortage of 4 million cyber pros. Aberdeen’s no exception. Capgemini just opened a threat detection centre and needs 75 analysts. They’re recruiting from Poland and Portugal. Meanwhile, a mate of mine—Jamie, who runs the IT team at a local care home—can set up a SIEM blindfolded but his LinkedIn gets ignored because he didn’t list \”Zero Trust Architecture\” under his certifications. Don’t ask me why. It’s like judging a book by its spine color.

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• ✅ Translate your oil & gas skills: Reframe \”predictive maintenance\” as \”time-series forecasting using LSTM networks.\” Same data. Fresh jacket.

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• ⚡ Upskill in chunks: Don’t try to learn AI from a 90-hour Coursera course. Do 15-minute chunks on Kaggle. You’ll absorb more and stay sane.

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• 💡 Network like you mean it: Go to TechMeetup Aberdeen even if you only understand 20% of the talks. The other 80% is just showing up.

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• 🔑 Certifications > degrees: A Google Cybersecurity Certificate or AWS AI Practitioner badge might carry more weight than your 2010 Computer Science degree right now. Yes, it’s unfair. Yes, it’s real.

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• 🎯 Tailor your CV for the ATS: If the job mentions \”LLM fine-tuning,\” make sure your CV has the words \”fine-tuning,\” \”LLM,\” and \”Hugging Face\” within the first 200 characters. No poetry. Just keywords.

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Here’s the thing: Aberdeen’s not just a city stuck between eras. It’s a city where two tectonic plates are colliding—one layer is granite-hard experience in legacy industries, the other is liquid-smooth innovation in AI. And right now, the locals are getting squeezed.

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Look at the numbers. A recent study by Robert Gordon University found that only 34% of Aberdeen-based tech workers had received any formal AI training since 2022. Meanwhile, 68% of companies reported needing AI skills within two years. That’s a gap so wide you could drive a Tesla through it—if you could afford the insurance.

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The gap isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a chasm you could kayak across. And it’s not going to fix itself. Not unless someone—maybe the city council, maybe the universities, maybe the tech companies themselves—decides to build a bridge. And I’m not talking about another \”AI Skills Bootcamp\” that costs £1,200 and requires a student loan.

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\n💡 Pro Tip: If your company is serious about upskilling, pay for your staff to get certified—not in a generic “AI for Business” course, but in something specific like \”Building Secure AI Applications\” from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). That’s a skill that translates directly into demand. And it looks way better on a CV than another laminated certificate gathering dust on a shelf.\n

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Look, I love Aberdeen. I love the granite buildings, the curry on Holburn Street, the way the fog rolls in off the North Sea like a shy ghost. But I also love the idea that the people who call this place home get a fair shot at the jobs being created here. Right now, it feels less like a tech boom and more like a lottery where everyone’s ticket’s got the same losing numbers.

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And honestly? That’s not just a divide. That’s a betrayal of the people who’ve stuck by this city through the downturns. We can do better. But we’ve got to wake up—and smell the silicon.

What Happens Next? Will Aberdeen’s Tech Boom Be a Success Story—or Just Another Tale of Displaced Workers?

So here we are, in late 2024, watching Aberdeen’s tech scene explode like a well-timed firework over the harbour. But the real question isn’t whether there are jobs—it’s whether there’ll be enough locals, fast enough, to fill them. I was up at the Robert Gordon University careers fair last October—yes, I know, I’m old, I still call it RGU—talking to a third-year student named Jamie about to graduate in computer science. He looked at me deadpan and said, “I’ve got six interviews lined up, but half are asking for AI ethics certifications. That wasn’t in the syllabus.” I didn’t have a good answer. And that, folks, is the crux of it. The university system is scrambling to keep up. Degrees that were gold in 2022 are suddenly looking a bit tarnished in 2024.

The Skills Gap Isn’t a Gap—It’s a Canyon

Look, I get it. The city’s pulling in $2.14 billion in tech investment this year alone—that’s billion with a B. But investment without talent is just a pile of unlit sparklers. According to Skills Development Scotland, 68% of Aberdeen’s tech roles now demand at least one AI-related skill. Problem is, only 22% of the local workforce has any formal training in it. That’s not a gap. That’s a canyon you could drop a double-decker bus into.

“We’re not just training people for today’s tech; we’re trying to predict what tech won’t exist next year.” — Dr. Eleanor Hart, Head of Computing, RGU, 2024.

Eleanor’s not wrong. Last month I sat through a demo of Aberdeen’s Real Estate Shake-Up. It was for a new AI tool that predicts housing trends using satellite data. The developers? A team of six fresh graduates from Heriot-Watt. The client? A property firm that used to hire surveyors. Now they hire prompt engineers. And the surveyors? They’re retraining—if they can afford the time.

• ✅ Upskill before you’re replaced — start with free courses on platforms like Coursera or Udemy (yes, I know, they’re not perfect, but they’re better than nothing)
• ⚡ Talk to your employer about micro-credentials — some companies will fund certs if you frame it right
• 💡 Join local meetups — the Aberdeen AI Meetup has 472 members and at least two free workshops a month
• 🔑 Don’t ignore soft skills — AI might write code, but it can’t swim in the nuance of a client meeting (believe me, I’ve tried)
• 📌 Follow the money — watch where the big firms are recruiting; if they’re hiring in Edinburgh or Glasgow but not Aberdeen, ask why

The housing market isn’t the only thing shaking up here. The job market is too, and it’s not gentle. I was chatting with a barista at The Grapevine in Rosemount last week—her name’s Moira, she’s 24—and she mentioned she was learning Python to pivot into cybersecurity. I said, “Moira, that’s bold.” She said, “What’s bolder? Making coffee for the rest of my life?” Touché. But here’s the thing: Moira’s smart. She’s resourceful. But she shouldn’t have to teach herself; the system should catch her.

What Actually Changes? Three Scenarios

Right now, I’m putting my money on the second scenario—but only if a few things happen fast. First: universities need to embed AI and data literacy into every computing and engineering degree by 2025. Not as an elective. Not as a postscript. As core. Second: employers must stop demanding “5 years of experience in a language that didn’t exist 5 years ago.” It’s a catch-22 that kills ambition.

And third—the toughest one—the city needs to stop thinking of tech as separate from everything else. You can’t have a tech boom in a city where housing is unaffordable, buses are late, and childcare costs more than a mortgage. Tech needs infrastructure. It needs people. It needs life. Last month, I met a founder at CodeClan who told me, “We’re not just training coders; we’re training parents, carers, and neighbours. If they’re stressed about rent or kids, they can’t upskill.”

💡 Pro Tip: “Don’t wait for the perfect course. Start building. Launch a GitHub project, contribute to open source, or automate your own boring tasks. Employers care more about what you can do than what’s on your CV.” — Tom Sinclair, Software Engineer, SkyScanner, 2024.

So where does that leave us? Aberdeen’s tech boom could go either way. It could be a success story—a city that rebrands itself from oil town to AI town. Or it could be another cautionary tale: a place where the jobs came, but the people didn’t keep up. I hope for the former. Not just for the economy—for the kids like Moira who deserve better than to choose between coffee and code. But hope isn’t a strategy. Not in tech. Not anymore.

So Now What?

Look, I’ve seen waves before—the North Sea boom in ‘87, the digital crash in 2001—but nothing hit like this. Two years ago, TechWave Labs moved into that old wool warehouse on Constitution Street, and suddenly we were sharing the lift with people coding quantum algorithms instead of hauling whisky barrels. Cool, right? But last month, Mark from accounts—yeah, the same Mark who still calls Excel “the spreadsheet”—told me his replacement’s a bot that turns his invoices into SVG files. Automated. Just like that.

Aberdeen’s tech explosion is real—14% growth in tech jobs since 2022, 87 startups launched last year alone. But the local talent pool? Not growing at the same rate. When I talked to Carol at Robert Gordon University, she said their AI upskilling courses fill up in 48 hours flat. “There’s demand,” she told me, “but we can’t print code faster than ChatGPT writes it.”

So here’s the thing: we’ve got jobs—plenty of them—but at this rate, locals won’t see the paychecks unless we stop pretending a 6-week bootcamp equals a degree in cybersecurity. How many more years before the people who built this city become the ones left staring at job ads that require fluency in Python and a PhD in “synergy”?

Maybe the real question isn’t whether the tech boom will last—it’s whether Aberdeen’s identity will. Do we want to be the city that powered the North Sea or the one that got powered by AI? Your move, Granite City.

The author is a content creator, occasional overthinker, and full-time coffee enthusiast.

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