Cognizant volunteers to support UK’s AI skills push

Cognizant has become a strategic industry partner to the government’s TechFirst programme (see here). Backed by £187m of public funds, the broader Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)-sponsored initiative aims to support over 4,000 graduates, researchers and innovators, and reach one million students in secondary schools across the UK.

The involvement in TechFirst will see Cognizant provide 100 work placements over the next four years to undergraduate and master’s students. The opportunities will be aligned to the Digital & Technology Sector Plan’s six frontier industries as outlined in the government’s UK Industrial Strategy (see here). News of the firm’s participation in the programme follows the announcement in March 2026 that Microsoft UK became TechFirst’s first strategic partner committing to 500 work placements and 5,000 employee volunteering hours through to 2030.

The support for TechFirst is not Cognizant’s only contribution to the efforts to get UK plc AI ready. At the beginning of 2026, the firm joined parallel but connected government-industry partnership, the AI Skills Boost. Launched in June 2025 with the involvement of eleven founding partners including Accenture, Amazon, Google and IBM, the initiative intends to get ten million UK workers trained in essential AI skills by the end of the decade. Over one million of the free-to-use courses had been completed on the AI Skills Hub by the start of this year.

The digital skills shortage in the UK remains one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption. TechFirst and AI Skills Boost are both positive steps towards addressing this challenge. As we have noted before, however, the government cannot ignore the equally pressing, legitimate and widespread concerns about AI’s impact on employment. A strategy for job displacement is also needed.

Posted by: Duncan Aitchison at 09:05

Tags:



training
 

government
 

AI