IT Worker Demand At Second Highest Level Since 1998

IT workers are in huge demand in the UK with figures showing that call for permanent employees is at its second highest level since August 1998 and the sector is second among those vying for employees across the entire job market.

Figures from the Report on Jobs produced by KPMG and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation [REC], showed that demand for permanent workers hit 69.8 per cent in September with temporary IT worker demand close behind on 66.2 per cent.

Permanent IT job demand actually dropped when compared to the previous month’s figure of 69.9 per cent meaning it was only the second-highest month since August 1998 whereas temporary IT worker demand was at the highest rate since the same month.

Even with all this optimism, KPMG’s CIO Advisory practice partner Heath Jackson has warned that firms should be vigilant due to the level of training that is still needed for new employees entering the sector.

“Youth unemployment, for example, is still too high and the next few months will be a critical test of how businesses can help get the new generation of workers onto the employment ladder. With skills shortages becoming ever more evident, ‘grow your own’ becomes a differentiator for businesses willing to attract the youngest candidates and build robust training programmes to skill them accordingly,” Jackson added.

IT came out second among the nine sub-sectors tracked by KPMG and REC when permanent jobs were examined and for temporary positions IT & Computing workers were fourth highest in terms of demand of the nine tracked sectors.

Data scientists are one role that is in huge demand and, accordingly, KPMG teamed up with Rackspace earlier this summer on a project to help address the shortfall in data scientist roles by offering education to international PhD students.

That scheme was launched after an IT Jobs Watch data set reported that the amount of permanent data scientist roles over the past two years had risen by 1,005 per cent and there’s no sign of the sector’s growth slowing any time soon.

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