Nicholas Enticknap reports on the undercurrents that are sweeping
through the post-Y2K recruitment market
A total of 21,000 jobs were analysed by the SSP/Computer
Weekly Quarterly Survey of Appoin-tments Data and Trends, about
40% down on this time last year.
The decline was caused partly by the lull in recruitment
following completion of the Y2K compliance projects, but also by
the growth of job advertising on the Web. (These jobs are not
counted in the SSP survey, which tracks only advertisements in the
trade weekly newspapers and quality national daily press.)
The number of jobs appearing was typically in the 16,000 to
18,000 range, more than four times as many as a year earlier.
All types of job have shown a significant decline this time.
Networking specialists fared best, with jobs down just 19% from
2,600 to 2,100. This is the seventh consecutive quarter in which
networking jobs have done better than the average, and they now
account for one in 10 of all IT jobs advertised.
Managers are also more in demand than most with 2,600 jobs on
offer over the quarter, down 22% on last time compared with the
overall market decline of 42%.
Those doing worst include, perhaps surprisingly, trainers, who
saw their opportunities fall by two-thirds from this time last
year.
Less surprising is the continuing decline in traditional posts.
There were less than 1,600 jobs offered to analyst/programmers,
compared to 6,000 a year ago. This is largely a matter of
nomenclature and fashion: system developers, who do a similar job,
fell by a much smaller amount, from 6,300 to 4,300.
Operators are a dying breed, with just 170 jobs available, 80%
down on a year ago. This is a reflection of the march of
technology: the skills that operators used to apply are now
required more in the networking area than in standalone
systems.
System programmer recruitment fell to a new record low, with
just 125 jobs on offer. Here again we have a change in job title
fashion: demand for technical analysts and system architects rose
to over 600 this time from under 400 a year ago.
The salaries on offer rose by 3.8%, rather more than in most
recent editions of the survey (in the second quarter it was 3.4%, a
year ago it was just 2.7%). The figure this time is only just under
the 3.9% average earnings inflation across the whole of UK
industry, and is rather higher than the 3.3% RPI inflation in the
year to September.
The average rise does conceal some significant variations, as
can be seen in Table 1 on p36, which shows the average salary
figures across all industries, geographies and platforms for some
of the major job titles.
There were significant differences in recruiting activity by
different industries over the quarter. Three of the user industry
sectors actually increased advertising relative to this time last
year, led by the public sector which raised its requirement by 13%
to just under 1,000. The publishing/media sector increased its
recruitment from 550 jobs to 600, while the utilities sector
offered five more jobs than in the same period a year ago (and
twice as many as in the second quarter).
These are all fairly small industry sectors. The largest user
sector, banking and finance, cut its advertising by more than a
half, from 4,200 to 2,000 positions. The manufacturing and
engineering sectors both cut back by an even greater amount.
The three IT industry sectors - hardware suppliers, software
houses and communications companies - accounted between them for
just over a half of all jobs advertised.
The vast majority of jobs offered involved working with PCs
and/or PC servers - four out of five jobs where the platform was
specified. Most of the rest were for Unix sites. Only 6% of jobs
were for IBM mainframe and mid-range, other mainframe, Digital
Equipment and Hewlett-Packard sites put together.
The total jobs offered involving IBM mainframes (450), AS/400s
(371) and Digital minis (191) were all the lowest ever recorded by
SSP.
Regionally, the decline in the number of jobs was fairly
uniform. Inner London registered the smallest decline from a year
ago, at 38%, and in doing so ended a run of four consecutive
quarters where it did worse than average. Scotland, which had been
the most buoyant region for each of the previous three quarters,
fell to well under 1,000 jobs this time. Northern England saw the
biggest year-on-year decline, down 60%.
That 17,000-odd figure is almost as many as the total found by
SSP throughout the three-month period, but this does not mean that
Web advertising now exceeds magazine advertising. An "Internet ad"
is not the same thing as a "magazine ad".
This is because an Internet ad appears for a variable length of
time, quite a lot of them for a month or more. A magazine ad
appears only once, unless the advertiser decides to put it in again
(and pay for it again).
Many of the jobs appearing on the Web are far less detailed than
those in the magazines. A feature of this year has been that
"shopping list" ads have disappeared almost entirely from the back
pages of Computer Weekly and other publications, and are now found
only on the Web. These are ads placed by recruitment agencies
detailing large numbers of jobs with minimal detail, such as
"Manchester: RPG anal/prog with 12 months experience,
c£26,000".
The effect of this trend by agencies, to use the Web for this
type of ad, has been to reduce significantly the number of jobs
that appear on any one page of Computer Weekly. In the first
quarter the average jobs per page in all publications was 19, by
the second quarter it had fallen to below 16, while in the last
quarter it was well below 14, and at the lowest level ever
recorded.
The number of pages of advertising, therefore, provides a truer
measure of the health of the IT job market, as each page costs
(give or take) the same. The total number of pages last quarter was
just over 1,500, which is only 16% down on the figure for the same
period last year. This metric suggests that the slowdown in
recruitment following the Y2K frenzy is coming to an end.
Table 1: Average salaries on offer
| | Average
salary | Average
salary | Change |
| Job title | offered in
3Q00 | offered in
3Q99 | |
| Management/systems
consultants | £71,773 | £70,908 | +1% |
| IT manager | £57,343 | £54,398 | +14% |
| Systems
analyst | £28,598 | £28,115 | +2% |
| Programmer | £24,559 | £23,543 | +4% |
| Analyst/programmer | £27,310 | £26,804 | +2% |
| Systems
developer | £32,079 | £31,372 | +2% |
| PC support
analyst | £21,955 | £22,162 | -1% |
| Software
engineer | £29,727 | £28,627 | +4% |
| Network support
technician | £23,354 | £21,173 | +10% |
| Operator | £21,857 | £20,891 | +5% |
Table 2: Breakdown of jobs by region
| | Jobs in
3Q00 | Jobs in
3Q99 | Change |
| Region | | | |
| Inner
London | 3,402 | 5,514 | -38% |
| Outer
London | 2,947 | 5,052 | -42% |
| Southern
England | 5,818 | 9,764 | -40% |
| Wales &
West | 1,639 | 3,126 | -48% |
| Midlands &
East | 2,081 | 4,554 | -54% |
| Northern
England | 1,917 | 4,742 | -60% |
| Scotland | 755 | 1,312 | -42% |
Table 3: Breakdown of jobs by industry sector
| | | |
| Sector | Jobs in
3Q00 | Jobs in
3Q99 | Change |
| Computer
suppliers | 594 | 716 | -17% |
| Software
houses | 8,555 | 14,345 | -40% |
| Comms
companies | 3,102 | 3,184 | -3% |
| Banking/finance | 2,040 | 4,244 | -52% |
| Distribution/retail | 931 | 1,211 | -23% |
| Media/publishing | 590 | 555 | +6% |
| Manufacturing | 160 | 485 | -67% |
| Engineering | 272 | 650 | -58% |
| Utilities/energy | 162 | 155 | +5% |
| Public
sector | 997 | 856 | +13% |