Demand for UK ICT staff continues to fall

By Steve Malone

Posted on 11 Mar 2003 at 14:43

Demand for ICT staff in the UK continued to fall in the last quarter of 2002 with a 40 per cent drop in vacancies. So says the quarterly round up of statistics in the British ICT labour market from e-skills UK organisation.

Employment levels in ICT remained flat in the last quarter of 2002, although unemployment among ICT personnel (5.2 per cent) fell below that of the general market for the first time in a year. Yet at the same time, demand for ICT staff continued to fall, measured by the number of jobs advertised in the press, on the Internet and through recruitment agencies.

The bulletin points to the Computer Weekly/SSP Quarterly Survey that counted 66,400 vacancies for ICT staff of which 55,600 were permanent and 10,900 contract jobs. These numbers represent a whopping 40 per cent drop on the previous quarter across all job sectors. Meanwhile demand for contractors fell by just 5 per cent. Core programming skills such as Visual Basic, C++, Sybase and Java were among the biggest fallers while TCP/IP, SAP and Access bucked the trend and showed a rise.

Despite the fall in vacancies, salaries for permanent ICT staff rose by 1 per cent last year to an average £36,000. In contrast, contract rates continued to slip, falling by 4 per cent overall since the previous quarter and leaving the average annual equivalent rate for contractors at £63,000.

Although the outlook for job seekers looked gloomy, every cloud has a silver lining. The downturn in the market has meant that skills shortages have all but disappeared in a number of sectors. While there were still shortages in certain key areas, according to the Cranfield/Telegraph RCI survey, just 2 per cent of all UK businesses said they were experiencing difficulties recruiting IT/Telecoms staff. Looking forward, the same survey said that just 9 per cent of UK firms were expecting problems filling vacancies over the next 6 months.

e-skills UK is an industry organisation responsible for addressing the IT and telecoms skills needs of employers in the UK.