Research

e-skills Bulletin

Access direct at www.e-skills.com/bulletin

The e-skills Bulletin provides a quarterly summary of all the latest IT and Telecoms data collected from Government and private sources. The Bulletin focuses on changes in the market for related labour and skills but also provides an overview of what is happening in the market more generally. Data regularly featured within the Bulletin includes: stock market performance, spending patterns, company failures and redundancies, changes in employment, demand for skills, pay rates, education/training and future recruitment activity.

The Bulletin is aimed at all those with an interest in the IT and Telecoms sectors and in particular those involved in the recruitment, training and retention of IT/Telecoms staff. The Bulletin features highlights from the ICT Inquiry - a quarterly in-depth look at recruitment, training and related issues amongst our sample of HR and IT contact within GB establishments.

Current issue

Click on the links below to access the e-skills Bulletin current issue.

e-skills Bulletin issue 24 - Q1 2009
(PDF 1MB)

Key findings from the current issue include:

• Continued growth in the number of ICT staff in employment, with the number now at its highest level for over seven years.
• Quarter on quarter, the unemployment rate for ICT staff has fallen.
• Demand for ICT staff continuing to fall during the final quarter of 2008, with the number of advertisements for permanent and contract staff falling by 24% and 27% respectively over the Q3-Q4.08 period (to 98,000 and 23,000 positions).
• A drop in business confidence during the final quarter of the year and an increase in the number of company liquidations, but some increases in sector turnover and trade performance when compared with the previous quarter.
• Increases in hardware and software spending which put IT investment at its highest level since the same period a year ago.
• While advertised salaries have fallen in each of the past five quarters, actual pay awards to those in work have shown an increase over the past two.
• Employers still reporting hard-to-fill vacancies in the areas of Systems Development, IT/Telecoms Management, Programming and Systems Design.
• A number of tech skills also proving ‘credit crunch resistant’ including WAP, COM, Active X, and Sage (all of which featured in an increasing number of ads for both permanent and contract staff over the Q3-Q4.08 period).
• The top ten skills demanded by employers identified as SQL, C, C#, .NET, SQL SVR, Java, Oracle, ASP, C++ and Unix).

Previous issues

You can also access previous issues of the Bulletin in downloadable format.

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Last modified: 23 Apr 2009