Demand for IT contractors up 3% in UK

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Demand for IT contractors in the second quarter of 2012 saw a 3% increase, according to data from IT specialist recruitment site CWJobs.co.uk.

However, the quarterly data showed that demand for permanent staff declined for the first time since the second quarter of 2009 – falling 1%.

CWJobs.co.uk says the demand for contractors is "likely" to have been affected by the Olympics, with some organisations bringing in extra staff to cope with increased IT demand.

It said 90% of contract vacancies are located in the south of England, in close proximity to the London 2012 Games, although most IT contractor jobs are usually in the south when there are no games happening anyway.

Richard Nott, website director CWJobs, said: "The role IT specialists will play in delivering the games this summer should not go unnoticed.

"A significant number will have been recruited just to work on the opening ceremony, for example, and that’s before you take into consideration those extra hands needed for traffic management systems and broadcasting images and videos of the athletes in action."

The contract market has seen an increase in roles almost across the board, with only the retail sector seeing slight stagnation. Media sector recruitment of contractors has seen the greatest increase at 4.6%, which may or not be linked to games coverage. Software house recruitment was up by 3.1%, finance by 2.5%, manufacturing by 3.4% and public sector by 2.3%.

The contract skills showing as being in greatest demand are .Net, with vacancies up by 3.3%, followed by C# up by 3.1% . Elsewhere contractors with Agile, Java and SQL server have seen an increase of 3.2%, 3.1% and 3.1% respectively.

The data is based on jobs advertised on the UK’s IT and multi-sector recruitment websites, together with jobs advertised in IT business magazines, as well as national and selected regional press.

The latest monthly Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG Report on Jobs shows overall job vacancies continued to increase during July, but the latest improvement was the smallest increase for six months, although the IT sector was ahead of most other sectors.

IDG News Service

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