Jobwatch: Sybase salaries jump after Java rebirth

IT RECRUITMENT is seasonal, with the number of advertised jobs peaking in January and October. Because the volume of jobs advertised fluctuates weekly, your chance of finding the job you want will vary according to when you look.

Jobs advertised are also a good indicator of the IT industry's state of health. The volume of IT jobs advertised in specialist IT titles and the national and regional press is measured by Media Monitoring Services (MMS) and we have used its data to create this week's Jobwatch Index (above).

Excluding the adverts appearing in fortnightly titles, we found that 15.5% more IT jobs were advertised during the last four weeks than there were in the same period last year.

After challenging Oracle with aggressive marketing and a reputation for technological innovation in the early 1990s, Sybase's bubble burst in 1995 when growth collapsed and the company's overambitious technology plans fell apart.

Now, however, Sybase is leaner and more focused. With jConnect for JDBD, Sybase became the first major relational database supplier to provide native Java database connectivity. Its PowerBuilder family of tools will include PowerJ, allowing Java Beans to be embedded in Adaptive Server.

Sybase skills have always been most heavily in demand in the City, where salaries are high. Of the jobs which mention a salary - roughly half - the usual offer is between #40K and #50K.

There was a surge in job adverts in June and though most were in this bracket, an increasing number offered more than #50K.