The number of vacancies for IT professionals has leapt compared to this time last year with almost 90,000 job vacancies advertised in the UK this quarter. Companies that pared IT departments to the bone over the last two years are now starting to restore their depleted skill stock, post-recession. By Helen Beckett [19/11/2010]
The latest Salary Services Limited (SSL)/CWjobs.co.uk IT salary survey found:
• Demand for IT professionals grew with an increase of 7.6% in recruitment for the third quarter of 2010 compared to a rise of 1% to 2% in 2009
• UK IT vacancies increased 7.4% from 75,379 last quarter to 80,921 jobs in the third quarter of 2010
• Contract vacancies being 23.3% higher than at the beginning of the year
There’s more hiring to come, too, as job opportunities are still down by half of the 2007 and 2008 pre-recession levels," according to George Molyneaux, research director for SSL. This suggests CIOs and IT departments are not going full throttle on recruitment.
Andy Bristow, manager at Hays, notes that there’s a trickle-down effect from the implementation and staffing of more projects. "We are seeing an increase in demand for project managers, indicating a likely improvement for other project lifecycle related roles, such as developers, testers and systems integration specialists.“
The number of infrastructure roles continues to be driven by virtualisation projects and remote access technologies. Take-up is continuing to improve as these new technologies become more financially viable and easier to install.
According to the SSL survey, SQL remains the top skill in demand followed by C, C# and .Net. The only top ten skills to see a fall in demand are Oracle and Java. The survey also found senior database administrators can earn top dollar at rates of up to rates of £64 per hour with salaries of up to £68,364 in the finance sector.
"During this quarter a number of up and coming skills have been added to the tables," says Molyneaux. These include Agile, a project development process and VMWare, a virtualisation infrastructure platform," he adds. Others ‘ones to watch’ include Scrum, a management development tool used with Agile and Android.
Sector-wise, there are hotspots, too, says Hays. “A large amount of recruitment activity is coming from the business services sector, financial services and digital media companies as each look to take advantage of current trading conditions and perceived future potential."
Search CWJobs for SQL, C and .Net opportunities.
