 |
|
| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
|
 |
As promised, this week’s report will concentrate on the Project Manager and Business Analyst roles in the contract market. I feel that in order to appeal to these sort of people, this report should be two or three weeks late and then we could have a drains-up where, after analysing the RAG reports, we could think out of the box across the piece to facilitate a more focussed plan for the deliverables. If you don’t understand any of that, don’t worry. Nobody does. PMs and BAs talk like that to hide the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about either… So – to business. What sort of rates have PMs and BAs been able to command over the last six months? First of all, a general picture. Rates don’t seem to have moved very much. A project manager still gets a £3-£5 premium over a business analyst but both hover around the £35/hr mark and have done for the last seven months. Interestingly, if you had Prince in your CV around Christmas time you could have got up to £45/hr but now it seems to have settled back down to £35. So, was it worth it – reading those dull Prince II manuals and selling your soul to the templates so that your CV looked better? Let’s find out… Erm… It would appear that the answer is no. Sorry guys (and I mean that in a completely non-sexist way) but the number of jobs posted for BAs or PMs where Prince wasn’t mentioned far outweighed those where it was. And by outweighed, I mean by a factor of 100 in the case of business analysts (which isn’t a complete surprise) but also by a factor of around 25 for project managers, which must be a bit of a disappointment. In both cases, however, there has been a definite upswing this year, with demand more than doubling over the last half of 2003. BAs have had the bumpiest ride though, with rates dropping as low as £24/hr in November before leaping up again to over £40/hr in early January. In the big smoke, rates are higher, as would be expected. What is unexpected, however, is that while PMs – with or without Prince experience – and BAs without Prince, all come out at around the £38/hr range, BAs with Prince have been able to command a few quid per hour more. What’s more, business analysts in London have enjoyed a much bigger take-up in demand this year than project managers, with contract postings leaping from 1100 in December to over 2,400 in February. March looks like it will be another good month too. PMs (who don’t mention Prince) have seen demand double since last year. Mind you, so have people with Prince experience. Except I don’t call going from 15 postings to 30 postings a month exactly exciting… But it’s got to be better than people who put SSADM on their CV. All I can say is – when you do a search on a jobsite, don’t bother mentioning it. While the postings for PMs and BAs in London have leapt into four figures in 2004 (although they look like they’re flattening out a little now), contracts requiring SSADM knowledge are in single figures. My main advice is – if you’re looking for a PM or a BA role, don’t put stuff like Prince or SSADM or Rational in your search criteria because it will limit severely the set of results you get. A big surprise for me was that RUP hardly gets any contract postings for BAs or PMs and has remained in the low double figures over the last six months. However, contracts where C++, Java or Oracle are included have had much more impressive results, with requirements for Java and Oracle almost doubling since last year and C++ not far behind. Rates-wise RUP has also suffered; in September last year average rates were around £60/hr but now they’re below £40. C++ (currently around the £44 mark) can get you almost a tenner an hour more than Oracle, and six quid an hour more than Java. Looking at Scotland gives a completely different picture (except that RUP doesn’t even get a look in). Whereas Java and Oracle, after a very bad October last year, have picked themselves up and can now look for a rate around £30, C++ is not popular at all. The same is true for postings. C++ postings have been very poor, RUP almost non-existent, Java in low double figures (although still on an upswing) and Oracle the star of the show with over 120 postings in February. Wales is not a place to be if you’re a PM or a BA with additional skills. None of the skills mentioned above got much into double figures, whereas a search with no extra skills added (i.e. just searching for BA or Business Analyst, or PM or Project Manager) would get better results. Moreover, BAs seem to be much more popular in Wales, getting almost double the number of postings that PMs did. Similarly in Ireland, BAs are more popular than PMs, although for both the peak in January has been followed by a dip, most noticeably for PMs with postings halving in February, although BAs have also seen postings dropping by a third. So the moral of the story is: don’t bother learning clever stuff like SSADM or RUP because the only money involved is that spent on manuals or training courses. And I can think of much more attractive doorstops than the Prince2 manual. Finally – and this has nothing to do with PM or BA roles but it amused me all the same – here’s a great new idea for losing weight - http://www.mypetfat.com/. Next week’s article is open to requests at the moment. I’m considering looking at the financial market but let me know what you think at alan.potter@webalertz.com. Email me too if you’re interested in having access to the stats that we produce. Bye for now, Alan www.webalertz.com Mar 18, 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] |