IT contractor earnings climb to a new high for 2011

Ongoing economic uncertainty is seeing UK and European firms increasingly turn to contract and freelance workers, who can be hired quickly over the internet but let go more easily should conditions worsen.

In fact, fresh figures from jobs behemoth Elance show a 55% jump in the hiring of online contractors and self-employed people by UK firms in the third quarter of this year.

Also between this July and September, European firms notched up their spending on contract staff, by 53%, the jobs site showed, when compared to the same period in 2010.

“Businesses are embracing the flexibility that a freelance workforce offers,” the site said. “Contractors are snapping up opportunities to work online at a time when traditional employment routes are flat-lining.”  

Unlike some jobs reports that don’t separate contract from permanent placements in IT, such as Monster’s jobs index, the findings from Elance give a specific analysis of ‘IT contractor earnings.’

It shows that the three months from this July proved to be the most lucrative quarter for IT contractors in more than a year – with $22m (£14m) in fees reported, up on the $16m they earned at the same time last year and higher than the $20m in this year’s second quarter. 

Charts provided under the figures detailing the number of IT contractor placements through the site mirror the upward pay trend: 67,000 freelance IT posts were recorded in Q3 2011, up from 40,000 in Q3 2010.

The bulk of the growth in IT contractor hiring appears to have been between the fourth quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of this year – which, although initially slow, ended up adding 17,000 IT contractors to the ranks of UK firms.

IT contractor intake has since notched up in the low-thousands – around 2,000 or so were added between Q1 and Q2, rising to an additional 3,000 IT contractors between Q2 and Q3. 

Yet overall though, IT contractors are dominant on the site: 61% of all fees paid to workers on Elance go to IT and computing professionals, with the nearest competition being creatives, who account for 24% of the total earnings.

The site’s 20 ‘hottest’ skills (- in total 100 are charted in order of growth demand), confirms IT’s healthy presence: it includes PHP programmers – ranked 1^st, HTML programmers (5^TH), CSS (6^th), MySQL (7^th), JavaScript (10^th) and .Net (19^th).