Even though despite the credit-crunch permanent ICT
vacancies are showing a slight upwards trend ,advertisements for
ICT contractors have slumped over the last quarteraccording to the latest e-skills Bulletin.
The latest quarterly guide to information about changes in the
demand/supply of ICT labour and skills in the UK has revealed
that in addition to a general 11% downturn in contractor
appointments, worrying declines were observed for a number of
specific roles. These include senior business analysts,
management/systems consultants, senior database administrators/
analysts, senior PC support analysts and senior software engineers.
Appointments in these roles were down by around one third or
more.
Advertisements for contract positions requiring ISDN, OSI,
Macromedia, Informix, Uniface, Active X, Foxpro, X25 or Frame Relay
skills have experienced even bigger falls, in some cases
disappearing.
The e-skills Bulletin adds that the decline in the number of
vacancies for programming has been a very noticeable for the last
two years at least. It quotes figures provided by
the UK Office for National
Statistics (ONS) which state that the number of software
professionals working in the UK has been in decline for the last
five consecutive quarters. In that period, the number of software
professionals fell from 335,000 in the final quarter of 2006 to
295,000 by the first quarter of 2008.
The survey also revealed that software professionals were also
found to be one of the few groups of ICT staff experiencing
reductions in average weekly earnings. Wages slipped by 1% to £660
per week in the first quarter of 2008 compared with Q107. During
the same period of time, salaries for all ICT staff had risen by
around 2%. conversely, during that time wages for UK workers as a
whole had risen by 4%.