Increasing competition for ICT labour and skills

e-skills UK reveals there is a continuous decline in the in the number of ‘ready candidates’ for IT jobs and an increase in the number of jobs on offer  implies increased competition for recruiters during the second quarter of 2010. Rates for IT staff rose slightly as a result, though actual earnings remained unaffected on the previous quarter.

Key findings include:

The number of advertised positions for IT staff increased for the fourth consecutive quarter to 94,000 positions even as the count of ‘ready candidates’ (in/out of work IT staff that were seeking new/additional jobs) declined to 112,000. 

However, the occurrence of IT skills shortages remains at an historically low level and just 12% of IT recruiters stated that they found it difficult filling IT posts during the previous quarter due to a shortage of candidates with the required skills, qualifications or experience. 

In the long term should the demand for certain occupations continue, as a result, in the near future it may become difficult to recruit for systems auditors, systems developers/senior systems developers, business analysts/senior business analysts, projects managers, senior test analysts, development team leaders.

A number of IT skills were also related to longer term demand increases and/or above average advertising durations, such as: Sybase; MVS; Coldfusion; Pegasus; Assembler; Axapta; DSP; Loadrunner; ATL and Swing

The unemployment rate for IT staff fell to 3.4% compared with a comparison figure of 8.3% for the workforce as a whole.