 |
|
| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
|
 |
Welcome to this week’s edition of Contract market news. We have a winner of our competition who correctly spotted “Lizard licker”, “Womble Stylist” and “Egg Sniffer” as the spoof jobs I posted. These have now been removed. However there is still a week left to find any stupid mistype by an agent. The winner, identifying himself only as The Mysteron (and I’ve been wondering what those strange hollow circles of light on my wall were) chose not to accept the bottle of bubbly, but instead asked that the money be donated to charity. So I have given the money to Cystic Fibrosis Research instead. Thank you, Mr Mysteron. There’s still a bottle of bubbly available to anyone from the newsletter fraternity that finds the best stupid posting, however. This week we’re looking at IT contracting positions in vertical markets, or niche industries, or whatever the current phrase is. We’re looking at pharmaceuticals, we’re looking at telecoms (and how you spell it), we’re looking at the military and we’re looking at pole dancing. Well, I am anyway. I just hope my expenses are paid because she was very, very expensive… Anyway, I thought I’d start with pharmaceuticals. Another subject I know nothing about – honestly, officer. GMP is a popular skill out there apparently and rates really have yo-yoed from £85/hr in December (possibly a contract posted by someone who was trying out pharmaceuticals themselves) to £17/hr in March. I don’t have any figures for the last couple of months but this might be because, as I’ve explained in the past, agents frequently put “Best rate” or “Market rate” or whatever. As for demand, it’s been in single figures for the last ten months. GAMP has had an even worse demand result with some months not having any contracts at all and most barely getting to two. Of course, this is a highly specialised area and so there may be jobsites that only deal in that arena and we’re not reflecting the demand appropriately. CFR on the other hand is starting to pick up. It’s still in single figures but it looks like interest is growing. What’s more, after rates around the thirties at the end of 2003, we’re now looking at £65-75/hr now. Not bad, eh? Moving swiftly on, we’ll now look at the telecoms industry. Or should it be spelled “telecomms”? Well, if you choose the latter spelling when you do a job search you might actually get a better rate! At the moment, “telecoms” contracts are paying, on average, £25/hr whereas “telecomms” will find you a rate of £34/hr. My spell checker is complaining about “telecomms” which shows that you should never trust them to get you the best rate… Having said that, there were 230 contract roles posted for “telecoms” as opposed to 71 for “telecomms”. Mind you, that extra nine quid an hour makes up for being illiterate, don’t you think? And, anyway, I believe it should be “Telecomms” even if the Microsoft Word spell checker doesn’t. I think that Dubya is probably editing the spell-checker dictionary. Talking of Dubya, military contracts are not that popular. Last month there were only 14 posted (unless there is a special site for them) after a peak of 23 in January. Even the rates aren’t that good, dropping from £30/hr in January to 20/hr now. I think, in the interests of global peace I shan’t make any comments except to say that we found no contracts offering requirements of weapons of mass destruction experience. Even intelligence rates have been dropping, which will be a relief to many, especially as they won’t realise I’m referring to money rather than IQ. In March you could have expected a rate of almost sixty quid (and eight for the fruit bat) whereas now it’s shrunk to around £25/hr. BTW those of you who don’t get the fruit bat reference, let me know. I guess it won’t help if I explain that it’s to do with Eric the half a bee… Requirements-wise for intelligence, it’s not been too bad, with a peak of 52 contracts being posted in May, and 19 so far this month. On the contrary, if you’d put “thick” in your search criteria you would only have had 2 job notifications last month, for example, and sometimes you would not receive any jobs at all. Having said that, being thick could have earned you £54/hr in February and was offering £23/hr last month. So that’s it for this week. The moral is – it doesn’t matter whether you can’t spell or whether you admit that you’re thick, there’s a high-paying contract out there for you! Alan Potter Jul 8, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
|
|
   |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| All content © Contractor UK Limited | [Register for News Letter] | [Privacy Statement] | [Terms of Use] | [Top of Page] |