Recovery in IT contractor demand stalls

The improvement that IT contractors saw in November appears to have been only a blip, as demand for temporary IT skills sunk last month to a lower level that at any time during 2011.

In their latest monthly Report on Jobs, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation scored temporary IT staff demand at 51.4 (against 57.0 last December), compared to 52.8 in the previous report.

Until now, October was the lowest point of late for IT contractors – the month when the Agency Workers Regulations took effect, when the confederation’s index stood at 52.1.

The decline in temporary roles, which now affects IT and seven other occupations - including engineering - which REC monitors, “is a clear indication that businesses are too nervous to even make short-term [staffing] commitments”.  

Uncertainty across the eurozone is to blame, added Bernard Brown, partner at report co-author KMPG, the professional services firm, as is “so much talk of a tough year ahead.”

Still, full-time IT staff recruiters struggled to find digital marketers, Web architects, IT security skills and candidates for enterprise software and .Net positions.

Also in December but for temporary IT jobs, the REC agents reported a shortage of contract candidates skilled in Oracle, .Net, Datastage, Citrix and Firewall technologies.