Demand for new IT professionals plummets

But jobseekers should "brush up and excel" on skills that are hard to find, says e-skills

About 27,000 IT professionals are currently looking for work

Despite the rising tide of redundancies across all sectors, the number of IT staff in employment is at its highest level for more than seven years, according to a report by sector skills council e-skills UK.

But the situation for IT professionals looking for a job is bleak, as demand for new staff continues to fall, according to the report, which claims the number of permanent and contract job ads fell by 24 per cent and 27 per cent respectively over the last two quarters of 2008.

According to e-skills, the largest decline in permanent IT job advertisements was for database-related positions. Other areas have also seen a drop in recruitment, such as systems design (down 33 per cent), internet-based positions (down 29 per cent), PC support (down 27 per cent) and operations (down 27 per cent).

Contractors were also hit hard, as vacancies available for freelance IT staff declined across all areas of expertise. The largest decline in demand was seen in programming (down 32 per cent), system design (down 31 per cent), software engineering (down 29 per cent) and systems development (down 27 per cent).

According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, there are about 27,000 technology professionals looking for work. But e-skills suggests there are still areas of growth within IT in hard-to-fill vacancies.

Among the recession-proof technology skills listed by the report are WAP, COM, Active X and Sage, all of which have demonstrated an upward trend in demand. The report also advises candidates to brush up on and excel in sought-after skills such as SQL, C, C#, .NET, SQL SVR, Java, Oracle, ASP, C++ and Unix.

“To us here at e-skills UK it would seem prudent, if you are in work, to bed down and make the most of what you’ve got, particularly in the contract market – after all, job openings are comparatively few and far between at the moment,” the report stated.

While the current employment market is tough, things are not as bad for IT professionals as they were at the beginning of the decade.

“It would be flying in the face of the wind to state that economic problems do not exist, but on the face of it, it seems to be that – in ICT terms at least – things were not as bad at the end of the year as we may have originally thought,” says the report.

“Certainly, (to date) nothing like what was happening in the post-Y2K period when redundancies, employment levels, IT expenditure and labour demand were all in much worse shape than at present.”