 |
|
| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
|
 |
Welcome to the first issue of Contract Market News, provided by WebAlertz.com. Every week we will be presenting a view on the current state of the market in contracting. It will vary week by week but will cover topics such as: an analysis on the difference in average contract rates for different programming skills; a comparison of contract rates for a particular skill by area; rate differences for different skills (like project manager vs. team leader vs. programme manager); or how many contracts are advertised for each skill type. These reports will be based on statistics collated from the contracts posted on major job sites. These statistics have been collated since August last year and continue to be collected on a live basis. For more information, visit www.thestatz.com. This week we are showing the average hourly contract rates offered across Britain since last September for certain programming languages. The skills we’ve chosen are Visual Basic, C++, Java, C#, .net, j2ee, COBOL, PL/1 and Delphi. And this is how things have gone:  As you can see, rates have been moving around quite a bit over the last 4 months with reductions in places of almost 20%. PL/1 is extremely volatile but I believe this is due to low demand skewing the results. Interestingly enough, the PL/1 curve is almost an exact mirror image of the same query on permanent jobs. C++ still seems to be the most popular language for development and this is also borne out by analysis on the permanent salaries on offer. Java/J2EE is not far behind, catching up after its fall earlier in 2003. From an operating system point of view, UNIX skills still demand the highest average contract rate, although they have started to converge with the MS world. Of the flavours of UNIX, Solaris still stands out as the most popular, although HPUX had a roller-coaster ride with average rates set at £38 in September, peaking at nearly £50/hr in November, and now dipping down below £30. Linux rates also had a roller-coaster ride, although this was more the sort you’d find at Legoland than Alton Towers. Rates still varied by £10/hr over the period however. Over in MS land, NT is still a popular platform with rates remaining almost constant on a £30/hr level. W2K is losing popularity, whereas XP seems to mirror the NT rates. Interestingly enough, there is still demand for DOS, although the rate is between £15 and £20. In Appleworld, Mac demand seems to be rising with rates going up by almost a third since September. Just for a laugh, I also added cp/m as one of the operating systems to include. Believe it or not, in October, a contract was offered for that with a rate of about £15/hr. For those young whippersnappers reading this, cp/m was the operating system (okay, there were others, but cp/m ruled the roost) before Mr. G and IBM signed their pact. Finally, on the database side, Sybase was the top earner of the big 3, with rates consistently highest, peaking at £55/hr in December. However, that seems to have been a blip and it’s now beginning to converge with Oracle, which has remained fairly steady over the period at around the £37/hr level. SQL Server, already the lowest earner of the three, is currently below the £30/hr mark. So - the market in both the contract and permanent arenas at the end of 2003 turned out to be less volatile than predicted, and certainly not as alarming as the end of 2002. 2004 is widely expected to be a good year. Next week I will be analysing skill requirements by area. Feel free to give me any feedback. Report by Alan Potter at Web Alertz (alan.potter@webalertz.com) Web Alertz Instant notification of contracts to help you find a job within the IT industry. Developed for IT professionals by IT professionals . Jan 29, 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] |