IoT in the UK: Where the Jobs Are Outside London

Ask most people where UK IoT talent is concentrated and London is the reflex answer. It's true for headquarters and funding rounds - it's not true for where the engineering work actually sits, or where it's growing fastest.

The regional data tells a different story than the headlines

Specialist job-market data shows IoT-related demand (AWS IoT, embedded connectivity, sensor engineering) spread well beyond the South East, and it's the North of England posting the sharpest year-on-year growth in job-ad rank, ahead of the more established southern clusters. The skill sets employers are asking for alongside core IoT roles — LoRaWAN, MQTT, Bluetooth, industrial protocols like Modbus — are the same everywhere in the country; it's the location of the employer, not the skill set, that's shifted

The regional employers are real, not just funding announcements

It's easy to point at innovation-centre funding and government schemes; it's more useful to point at actual employers. MSite, headquartered on Liverpool Innovation Park, builds biometric access control and workforce management technology - turnstiles, facial recognition, time & attendance - used across UK construction sites, and employs around 350 people across the UK and Europe as part of the Infobric Group. Comelit-PAC, the access control division of the global Comelit Group, runs a dedicated Centre of Excellence in Manchester covering door entry, access control, intruder alarms and fire systems, alongside its UK head office in Luton. Between them, they're a concrete answer to "who's actually hiring for connected access control and alarm monitoring outside London" - not just a regional statistic.

Wearables are where IoT and connected healthcare genuinely meet

The crossover between our IoT and connected healthcare pillars is most obvious in wearables, and two UK examples make the case well. Current Health, founded in Edinburgh in 2014, built a wearable remote patient monitoring device accurate enough to match ICU-grade monitors, worn by patients at home - the business was acquired by Best Buy for around £303 million in 2022, one of Scotland's largest health tech exits. Isansys Lifecare, based at Milton Park in Oxfordshire, has spent over a decade building its Patient Status Engine, a wearable sensor and predictive analytics platform used by the NHS and international healthcare providers, and was ranked second in BusinessCloud's MedTech 50. Both show that wearable connected-health hardware is a genuinely fundable, exitable category of UK IoT company - and neither is based in London.

Infrastructure and funding are catching up to the demand

The data centre build-out reflects the same regional shift: Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Glasgow are all now home to significant data centre investment, driven partly by the low-latency processing that 5G and IoT deployments need close to where the devices actually are. On the policy side, the government's Regional Tech Booster programme, backed by £1 million of DSIT funding, is channelling mentoring and investment support into clusters in Scotland, the North East, Yorkshire, Wales and the Midlands - part of a wider picture in which around two-thirds of the UK's 83,000 active tech companies are now based outside London, employing 3.7 million people between them.

If you're building a team, the regional talent pools and infrastructure are deeper than they were even two or three years ago. We're seeing this shift firsthand across our own connected healthcare and IoT desk - if you want to talk through where the right candidates or the right roles actually sit, we're happy to have that conversation.