Fewer IT jobs were advertised last quarter than a year ago but programmers with key software skills are still very much in demand.

That's the conclusion of a study of the UK IT recruitment market by CWJobs, The Register's recruitment partner.

Experience in C++ (mentioned in almost 24,844 ads in Q1 2002), SQL (23,134), Unix (21,079) and C (20,532) were highly prized.

Requirement for C skills is holding up but mentions of other once sought-after skills was down 50 per cent from Q1 2001. This reflects an overall slowdown in the IT sector, CWJobs reckons.

Oracle, Win NT, Visual Basic and Java were each mentioned in more than 10,000 ads. However, demand for Java skills has slipped markedly from 40,681 mentions in Q1 2001 to 14,566, a decline of 64 per cent.

The number of jobs advertised last quarter is lower than that advertised in Q4 2001, but this may be affected by seasonal factors in the job market.

Online ads account for the vast majority of ads in Q1, reflecting a long-term trend in the UK IT jobs market. Which is nice. For CWJobs. For Computer Weekly, from whence it spawned, it's crap. ®