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| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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It’s that time of the week again and this time I thought I’d be truly punctual. I hope you all got over the subliminal advertising last week and that apart from being unable to get www.morejobz.com out of your mind, you have had no other long-lasting side effects. This week we’re going to be a bit schizophrenic (so no change there, then) in what we’re going to cover. First of all, I thought you’d be interested to see the sort of competition you have in terms of other job seekers. Then I will wander into the wonderful world of .NET. So let’s start with the sort of jobs people are looking for. We’ve decided to start a clean slate with www.moreJobz.com so that we get a true picture of the market at the moment rather than having a history of the last 9 months. So these stats are fresh. What are you job seekers actually looking for at the moment? Interesting, isn’t it? It’s not the distribution I would have expected as I would have thought that the keyword “manager” would be highest, but there you go. I think the biggest surprise, however, was with support. Less than 4% of people were looking for work in that area. This may not seem significant, but in the past a single support job post would get up to 800 applicants – mostly from overseas. So what do these figures mean? Well, I haven’t got a clue. Perhaps outsourcing abroad has reduced the number of non-nationals looking for support work here when they could find it locally. Also, the fact that only 3.5% of job seekers are looking for C++ work might suggest that there’s a lot of C++ work out there. Let’s have a look: Java has had the most postings in the last few days with 430, whereas C++ and VB have both been around the 350 mark. Oracle had 540 ads and jobs with the keyword “Manager” in them had 880 of which 380 were project management roles. ABAP had 12 postings. Supply and demand features strongly here because if you’re lucky enough to get an ABAP contract you’re looking at an average rate of £50/hr. A managerial role will get you just over £40/hr and Oracle just under. C++ is currently at £42/hr and Java and VB are both around the £36 mark. Now, as promised, we’re going to look at the MSoft world of .net. For those of you who aren’t MSoft lovers and amusingly call it Micro$oft or Microsnot or whatever, because Linux is soooo much better and it’s free and there are so many parameters you can tweak and it never crashes etc etc, this is probably the point where you should stop reading (except for my usual plug at the end of the article). Starting with C# and .net skills, the average rates have steadily been growing from £31/hr in September last year to around £38/hr now. Demand for these skills however has been far more interesting. For .net contracts the number of postings has consistently been in treble figures with a peak of over 600 contracts in February this year. However, last month there were only 280 postings. For C# it’s been much more of a rocky road, with March being the main month with over 300 postings. Last month it was just over 180. What about VB.Net and ASP.Net? ASP.Net has proven far more popular than VB.Net, although neither are as popular as the previous choices. VB.Net only had 54 postings last month, and ASP.Net had 86. VB.Net maxed out in February with 108 postings and ASP.Net did the same in March with 154. Rates-wise, things have been see-sawing over the last few months, especially ASP.Net. Currently it’s standing around the £30/hr mark. VB.Net seems to have stabilised at £34/hr. While we’re in this arena, I thought I’d have a look at the other wonderful things Microsoft inflicted on us, like COM, MTS, MSMQ and ASP. Well I’m going to whinge here because I spent nearly fifty quid on a book on MSMQ and do you know what the rate is for experience in that area? Zilch. Nada. Bugger all. Thanks, Bill. MTS has had a much better set of results. We’ve had at least one contract this month posted with a rate of £54/hr – and the average rate in November last year was £57/hr! Generally, though, the rate hung around the mid-thirties. COM has stuck fairly firmly to the low thirties apart from a dip around October when it went down to £25/hr. ASP has also been around the same sort of figures, without the dip. Currently it’s at about £33/hr. Demand on the other hand is very interesting. COM is extremely popular, with over 4,000 postings made every month over the first quarter of this year. Last month it dropped noticeably to 2,400 for some reason. ASP is the next most popular, although that peaked at only 600 in April. Last month it was almost halved. MTS stays in the low to middle double figures, except in April when there were over ninety postings for some reason. Bear in mind that this might be due to multiple postings skewing our figures. As for MSMQ – don’t even bother. There were 4 postings last month. Some months have no postings at all and four is the highest I’ve seen in the last 9 months. So that’s it for the week. All the MSoftoPhobes can start reading again. Why don’t one of you Unix people tell me what you’d like to see a report about? I know nothing about Unix so I need some keywords. Send me some! Alan Potter Jun 10, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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