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| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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The year 2007 begins with some surprise news. The average rate across the ten most commonly requested contract roles has fallen; from GBP34.61 at the end of November last year, to GBP30.49 this month. This southwards spiral of 13% is the biggest single drop in rates in the more than two years this column has been running. Normally, this would be cause for concern, particularly given that programme directors across the country have had January's juicy new budgets to play with for a whole month. But, contractors should not get the fear just yet. While there is an element of frugality behind this fall, the dramatic nature with which rates have tumbled is more to do with where the money is being spent. There has been a change of entries in our firmly established top ten, with ‘.NET developer’ entering to become the sixth most requested job title in the contract world. Architects, solidly in tenth place for many months, have finally fallen out. The £30.77 given on average to .NET developers, compared to the £40.00 an hour that architects pick up, has affected the averages somewhat. The staggering rise of .NET is made more impressive given that in the three months to January 2007, .NET development jobs where the 34th most advertised in IT contracting. The leap has taken .Net above Java development and C# development. It is not something that surprises experts in the area. Dave Wheeler is a Principal Technologist and .NET expert with QA. He puts the continued rise in demand down to the ‘radical differences’ differences between .NET 1.x and .NET 2.0, saying that, ‘firms are accepting that ASP.NET 2.0 is a step forward and have to get technically competent with it as quickly as possible.’ Last month, there were 3,033 advertised contract .NET jobs compared to the 1,567 of a year before. Another area on the up is financial contracting. Some one in four IT contractors now work in this field, according to a recent report by Giant Group. ‘Finance’ is the third most commonly requested single word in the more than 100,000 jobs we analyse each month, after other generic terms such as ‘analyst ‘ and ‘developer’. The hourly average for jobs in this field has risen 5% from GBP27 to GBP 27.86. The steady rise is down to the increasingly security conscious approach in finance according to Giant Group’s Matthew Brown. ‘Data security remains a major spending priority in the City,’ he says, ‘as is compliance, and the introduction of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive this year will require a significant further outlay on IT systems.’ So, the world of money is likely to be good for contractors for some time yet. His thoughts are supported by the research of Financial Insights. It finds an increase in IT investment in the City is likely to continue through 2007 in the financial sector. ‘Banks recognize the potential high value of IT investment,’ said Jeanne Capachin, VP of research at the firm, ‘but they also see that this high potential has not yet been realised.’ So, despite the falling headline average, there may be some basis to the expectation held by 58% of the UK’s contractors of pay rises of at least 10% in 2007, as revealed in the annual JSA Contractor Expectation Survey and reported by ContractorUK earlier this month. One location seeing a mini boom is Scotland. The Bank of Scotland reported that demand for IT staff north of the border rose during December last year. According to that bank’s chief economist, Tim Crawford, ‘growth rates were stronger than the UK average and pay rates also, reflecting the tightness of the Scottish market and rising demand for staff.’ While this is broadly reflected in our own figures, it is to be considered in context. Analyst is the most commonly requested job in Scotland, but last month, just 609 of these roles were advertised, compared to 9,597 in London and 17,200 in England. Matt Farquharson Data source: www.itjobswatch.co.uk Jan 31, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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