UK short 100K tech recruits this year
Quango quacks say IT growth to outpace national average
Posted in Management, 19th January 2011 12:24 GMT
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Demand for technology recruits is set to grow five times faster than the national average over the next 10 years.
There are now 1.5m people in the UK working in technology – about one in 20 UK workers, according to e-skills. About 40 per cent of these people work directly for technology companies, the rest in IT departments within other firms.
E-skills predicts employment in IT and telecoms will grow by 2.19 per cent a year – creating demand for an extra half a million trained people over the next five years. The technology workforce will need another 110,000 people this year alone – about half of these are expected to be people moving from other jobs into tech, and 17 per cent will come straight from college or university.
Numbers from e-skills also show the typical tech worker is old and male. The proportion of IT workers aged under 30 has fallen from 33 per cent to 19 per cent – which the quango reckons is down to recruiting staff from other areas of employment, rather than hiring college leavers. The number of tech workers aged over 50 has doubled to 17 per cent. Meanwhile women make up just 18 per cent of the typical IT department.
The telecoms and IT industry is worth £81bn to the UK economy, nine per cent of gross value added.
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COMMENTS
lies
show me the 100k jobs then.
It's not good enough to put out a press release full of lies about how many jobs there are, you have to *actually* provide jobs.
Perception is not reality.
One fifth of young people are currently unemployed. Doesn't matter if you're a university graduate or you only have ASBOs to your name; if you're under 24 you will have applied to in excess of 100 jobs in the last 6 months and got
NOTHING
"show us the jobs" Perception is not reality.
It's agencies that are the problem
I was recently on the job market with 20 years C/C++ experience (plus lots of other stuff) and *every* time the phone rang it was yet another bloody agency saying 'how many years ASP.NET have you got?' having clearly stated on my CV that I had little and wasn't interested in a thinly disguised web design job (after a while you soon realize that these are the same jobs that were advertised as HTML/Java jobs a few years back).
I got this job by emailing directly.. this company had given up on agencies for similar reasons and was very surprised that someone with my experience was finding it hard to find work - because they kept being sent people with web design experience and little or no knowledge of programming! I had to retrain for their development system - but as they said.. someone with experience can switch easily.. that's not an issue.
People with skills are there. Jobs for them to do are there. Agencies seem to be actively keeping the two separate. They don't read the CVs beyond a couple of keywords, they don't read the job requirements, and they don't have any knowledge of IT so are completely useless at their jobs.
i left the IT industry
I left the IT industry about 7 years ago. The millennium bug bubble had burst, the company I worked for treated the staff like crap and I was looking for another job.
All the jobs that were available at the time wanted Microsoft and Cisco certification along with at least two programming languages to boot... on top of that the pay they were offering was terrible. From the job descriptions I could tell it was going to be high pressure environments and considering the pay, I could get a job driving a forklift truck for just as much pay, no pressures.. 9-5 hours.... so I left IT and donned a hard hat..
Since then I have bought a hotel with my girlfriend and I am entirely responsible for the IT infrastructure including the budget!!! Happy days!!
Not just the young
Last year I finally landed a job after 18 months of looking - with my near 30 years of experience.
Frankly the other posts here are right - theres no skill shortage, theres no 100k jobs, the effort being made is to further reduce the wages. I have seen adverts coming past for 'experienced' engineers offering less than 20k. Frankly you can get nearly that collecting trolleys for Tesco.
The problem is inbetween the candidates and the employers...
> somewhere out there is a Java shop
I used to get offer after offer to apply for Java jobs - despite being primarily a C programmer. All the "recruitment consultants" (ha!) used to tell me that they get no call for C programmers, as everyone wants Java.
On the other side of the fence, when I was trying to recruit C programmers, I was offered CV after CV for Java and PHP programmers...
I always maintain that there is rarely a job shortage, and there is never a skills shortage. The difficulty comes because so many employers go through recruitment agencies, and that lot don't know their arse from their elbow.
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