Firms face up to IT staff shortages

E-skills report has good news for firms looking to recruit in IT

The UK IT skills shortage continued to worsen during the first quarter of the year but recruitment problems could soon ease, according to the latest report from technology skills body E-skills UK.

The quarterly skills bulletin, published in September, found that the advertised demand for ICT staff during the first quarter of 2006 grew five percent on the previous three months, with demand for agency staff also reported to have increased. Permanent staff with .Net, ASP, WAN and SMTP skills and contractors with Linux and PHP skills were in particularly high demand, according to E-skills.

The supply of potentially new staff also decreased, with only 53,000 IT staff reported to be looking for work – the lowest level in almost five years – and as a result almost a quarter of IT recruiters said they were having difficulty attracting the right applicants.

Awareness of this IT skills gap also increased, with five percent of firms claiming there was a gap in the skills of their IT staff. The report found the problem was particularly acute in technical positions, claiming that "firms most often faced skills shortages when recruiting for systems development and programming positions - this frequently being due to a lack of higher level technical skills among applicants".

The increased need to attract or retain technical staff meant IT salaries were also reported to have climbed slightly to an average of £670 per week for IT staff and £830 for IT managers.
Martin Smith, founding director of recruitment specialist GCS, agreed there was a major skills shortage developing in the market. "IT is candidate-poor at the moment and there are more jobs chasing not enough people," he added. "The problem is that during the early noughties when demand was low people weren't gaining experience as the jobs weren't there, but now the jobs are there you can’t find experienced candidates."

However, despite the shortages experienced during the first quarter the report claimed firms were confident the rest of the year would see recruitment problems ease, with just six percent of firms claiming they anticipated having difficulty recruiting ICT staff over the second and third quarter of the year.

But Smith argued that while some firms are moving to tackle the skills gap through improved training and increased offshoring of work, the underlying trend of IT staff shortages is likely to continue.