The IT jobs market was in good shape in the
first three months of 2007, with the number of
permanent jobs advertised reaching its highest level for five
years. But although the sea of jobs looks calm and inviting,
there is quite a bit of turbulence hidden beneath the
surface.
Below the calm waters there are signs of trouble in the low rate
of average salary increase, in the continuing decline in demand for
software engineering and networking staff, and in the fall in
demand for recently popular skills such as Visual Basic,
Sybase and even Unix.
For those with proven management experience, business acumen and
the skills and expertise to ride out the storms to come, the future
looks rosy. For those professionals earning lower salaries and
dependent on their expertise in the popular client/server
technologies of the 1990s, prospects are nothing like as good.
These are the main conclusions to be drawn from the latest issue
of the SSL/Computer Weekly Survey of Appointments Data and
Trends.
Employers have been particularly keen this year to take
contractors with premium skills onto their permanent payrolls.
According to Paul Smith, group marketing director at recruitment
consultancy Harvey Nash, "Employers are trying to secure people
where skills are really short and take them on permanently. We are
seeing contactors being head-hunted away."
This is evident in the SSL figures, with contract jobs for
senior staff down 20% from a year ago, while those for junior staff
have remained at more or less the same level.
There was also a significant shift away from the contract market
in central London. There, contract jobs were down nearly 33% on a
year ago, while permanent jobs offered in the capital rose by more
than 33%.
The London market is dominated by financial services, and
permanent jobs here were also well up, as they were in all the user
sectors. This was offset by a small decline in job offers made by
the IT industry.
Overall, the number of permanent IT jobs offered on the web was
up 4% on a year ago, and stands at its highest level since the
first quarter of 2002.
This statistic conceals some big variations in different areas
of the market, however. Management posts and PC support posts are
up 22% and 26% respectively inner London jobs are up by 37%, and
user site recruitment is up by more than 25%. In contrast, posts
offered to networking staff, software engineers and programmers all
fell by 8%-15%, jobs in the Midlands and the North were both well
down, and IT industry jobs were slightly down.
The surge in newspaper IT advertising over the past year has
come to an end. Magazine-based jobs were down by more than 33% on
the first three months compared to last year, and have returned to
the level they were at in 2005.
The temporary rise in recruitment over the past year and a half
was caused by the immense NHS contract, which distorted the figures
for a while. Public sector jobs in newspapers were down by nearly
50% on a year ago, although this sector increased job offers by 15%
in the permanent market over this period.
The contract market was down overall by 6% on a year ago. This
decline was mainly caused by the cutting back in recruitment of
senior staff. Contract jobs for them fell 20%, but recruitment of
junior contract staff fell by just 1%. IT industry recruitment of
all types of contractor fell by more than 25%.
The buoyant demand for skilled staff needs to be seen in the
context of a global recruitment market. As the practice of taking
development projects offshore continues to grow at about 40% a
year, so the need for skilled staff to manage these projects back
in the UK grows accordingly.
The flip-side is that employer willingness to use offshore
agencies is holding UK IT salaries down. Median permanent salaries
rose just 1.7% compared to early 2006, which compares with the 4.6%
average earnings inflation across all industries reported for
February by the Office of National Statistics.
Increases in contractor rates were a little higher at an average
2.6%, static compared to a year ago. Developers did notably well,
with their average rate rise over the past year standing at 8%.
Salary rises in the IT market have been lower than the national
average for all jobs in every quarter for several years now.
According to Smith, "The IT industry no longer commands a premium
over other industries, so people are not moving into IT so much. It
is not such an attractive option as it used to be."
In the skills league table the most noteworthy feature is the
decline of Unix to its lowest ever position of 10th. The most
popular of the proprietary versions of Unix, Solaris, is also
sliding inexorably down the table: this time demand was down 17% on
a year ago, producing a fall of six places in the table to
35th.
This is partly because of the increasing preference for the open
source alternative, Linux, currently in 17th place. But the decline
of Unix also reflects a shift of interest away from operating
systems generally. The highest Windows variant, XP, is lower in the
table than Linux, at 22nd. This is despite the fact that demand for
XP was well over double that of a year ago.
Smith sees this as a reflection of the static state of operating
system development. "There has been little change over the past
five or six years, no real kickers," he says.
The main issues during this period have been open source versus
proprietary and the best way to exploit the new opportunities
opened up by the web-based world. So the emphasis in job
advertisements has been less on operating systems and more on
development tools and methods.
Expertise in C#, .net,
Java, J2EE and the like have been the focus of attention, and
this is reflected in the chart. C# has made the top five for the
first time and .net is now sixth both are in their highest position
to date.
Smith believes that
Vista will change this. "The independent software supplier
community is beginning to move into the next development stage
because of Vista," he says.
There is as yet no sign of this movement in the SSL figures: IT
industry recruitment fell during the first quarter in both the
permanent and contract markets. The discrepancy is understandable -
Smith's opinion is based on direct feedback from recruiters about
what they are planning to do, while the SSL figures show what those
recruiters have done.
There was a notable upsurge in demand for enterprise resource
planning skills in the first quarter, especially in demand for SAP,
which shows the highest growth rate of any skill in the top 25 at
82%. This is because of the number of major SAP implementations
that are currently underway.
How the survey is conducted
This article is based on information from the SSL/Computer
Weekly Quarterly Survey of Appointments Data and Trends.
The survey analyses ads for IT professionals on the web, in the
trade press and the quality national dailies and Sundays. It is
intended primarily for recruitment agencies and CIOs with a
substantial recruitment requirement.
The posts are broken down into 55 categories, which include
details of the number of posts advertised and the average and
median national salaries offered for the past five quarters.
The survey provides further analyses within each job category by
platform type, industry sector and regional location. It also gives
a breakdown of the technical skills most in demand.
The survey costs £250 per issue or £350 for an annual
subscription. This covers four issues and includes a free software
program which allows selection of combinations of region, industry
and software skills for specified job types.
You can order
it online.
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