Demand for IT jobs stinks in UK
Slightly less stinky than other months though!
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There's significantly less demand for IT staff in the UK compared to last year according to a job report published today, although the tech sector has still fared better than most.
A March job report commissioned by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and accounting firm KPMG indicates the UK's overall job market continued to deteriorate last month, albeit at a slower pace than it has for the past six months.
Those are rather small positives in a gloomy monthly survey which polls 400 UK recruitment and employment consultancies. KPMG's head of business services Mike Stevens heaps on the pessimism if you were looking at the results as a sign the job market is limping towards improvement:
While some observes might see small upticks in all these indicators as evidence of green shoots of recovery, the reality is that the availability of permanent and temporary jobs in the UK continues to decline, salaries are being reduced and the pool of available candidates is rising further. These latest figures leave no doubt that the UK jobs market is at its worst in the 11 year history of the survey and recovery might take longer and be more protracted than many hope.
The report numerically represents demand for jobs so a figure below 50 indicates a drop from the previous month. A number above 50 signals stronger demand than a month ago. It's pointlessly confusing — but that's just how statisticians roll.
For permanent jobs in the IT & computing sector, March 2009 received a score of 31.9 compared to 52.4 in the same period last year.
Temporary/contract IT work got a score of 31.9 for the month compared to 55.6 in March 2008.
The only positive trend in demand for staff for March was in the nursing and medical care sector. Obviously, someone needs to give Americans their economic-depression inspired facelifts.
The (slightly) positive news for techies is that IT jobs are the least crappiest sector to be looking for permanent work. IT & Computing ranked slightly above executive/professional work (31.1), engineering/construction (30.2), accounting/financial (28.5), hotel and catering (28.3), secretarial/clerical (26.7) and blue collar (26.3).
Key permanent staff skill reported in short supply for the IT sector was developers.
For temporary and contract work, however, decline in available IT jobs ranked below everything but accounting and construction.
The IT temp skill in shortest supply is CNC programmers, according to the study.
A copy of the survey can be found here. ®
COMMENTS
We're all screwed anyway.....
Call me synical, but....
The big boys (HP, Ericsson, T-Systems - take your pick, there are many) come in with low bids, astound bosses with "low operating costs", TUPE over the employees (at least in good old Blighty), then as soon as is practical outsource the lot to some back-water country that pays peanuts for students fresh out of school with NO experience. Never mind the quality is crap. Never mind no-one understands the business. Its cheaper than most of us.
They secure the big contract, save money by reducing headcount, get their bonus and fuck the rest of us.
The only thing that stinks in IT is the board-room beancounters (and that's because they have their heads up someone's arse).
Not that I am bitter about it of course :-)
One day...
....the only jobs for us serfs will be in fast food outlets..or in factories pushing buttons (pretty much the same thing). Even the local papers (round here anyway) are banging that drum....running stories like "McJobs to the rescue..." Fuck that....I'll grow my own food and set up in some other business myself, even **** ***** and ******* before I sell out to one of those fucking godforsaken places. It's not I think it's beneath me to cook food for others - I just wouldn't want to be responsible for making a single penny for the vipers and thieves who own the large fast food outlets (in the case of Burgerking it's TPG, Goldman Sachs, Bain - All of whom have recently thieved even more money off us all in the form of government bailouts)
RE: RotaCyclic 09:30 GMT
I do NOT count CNC programmers as part of the IT industry!
Just because someone programs a sequence of simple commands into a machine, it doesn't make that an IT company, or the staff doing that programming as IT staff.
That there is fightin talk :+)
Todays task has been figuring out howto machine 4 sides of a rectangle on a rotating device, while only being able to use 1 datum point for reference and figuring out how far said datum point moves from previous position to new position as the part is rotated, then figuring out the tool positions to machine features onto said rectangle.
Given in the past I've written Java applications to recieve/send CNC control programs via the serial port, and have a distributed design of the above using a traditional client/server arrangement, I'd much rather debug a multi-threaded server thats having deadlock problems than do CNC stuff
But since open university qualifications dont seem to count for much with recruiters, guess I'm stuck with CNC stuff
Boris the Cockroach BSc(hons)(open). Dip.Comp.(open).
Pinguin... because I can write a Linux shell script too :+)
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