Big drop in IT contractor skills shortages

Not a single programming-based IT skill was scarce in November on a contract basis, making it hard for IT contractors to eke out premiums at a time of the year that often favours them.

Techies eying full-time jobs had a much easier month – eight areas of their IT skills market had ‘shortages,’ whereas in the IT contracts market there was just one, Digital Marketing. In the previous month, there were five.

Permanent IT job-seekers also seem to have benefitted from leftover budgets, as despite temps usually being hired in the run-up to Christmas and New Year, November’s most in-demand workers were IT full-timers.

The Recruitment & Employment Confederation, which publishes these findings today, scores demand for such permanent IT job-seekers at 64.0, with any score over 50 signalling growth on the previous month.

Using the same methodology, demand for IT contractors is scored at a more modest 60.5, shows the REC’s Report on Jobs, compared with 60.3 in October and 63.3 last November.

Demand for IT contractors is therefore increasing and its rate of growth is increasing too, but its REC index score is smaller than that of IT permies and smaller than it was a year ago.    

Contractors looking for work will likely want end-users to grow frustrated with not getting the skills they want from the permanent market, and look for a temporary solution instead.

Those eight areas that REC agents are struggling to fill IT vacancies in are Automation; Digital Marketing, eCommerce, Gaming, Security, Java, .Net and Web Development.

Seeming sympathetic to agents and end-users, Bernard Brown, partner at KPMG, said the “effects of ongoing skills shortages” were felt in November amid a “further tightening”.

He said: “Recruiters will hope the annual influx of job hunters in January will reinvigorate the market and replenish the rapidly diminishing pool of available talent.”

With only one skill among them currently on the shortage list, IT contractors will likely want exactly the opposite.