IT vacancies continue to stack up

There continues to be a huge demand for IT positions across the UK with tens of thousands of vacancies out there underlining the extent of the demand from employers for skilled individuals.

Industry association CompTIA has been taking a close look at Burning Glass Technologies Labour figures that showed there were 162,000 IT job openings across the UK in Q1, accounting for 9% of all the vacancies across the economy.

The most in demand skills were business analysts, architects and system designers, support technicians and IT and telco professionals. Web designers and developers were also being sought by employers looking to fill gaps in their staffing skills base.

The analysis also revealed that the NHS was one of the big advertisers of vacancies, along with Fresh Group limited, Amazon, KPMG and Barclays.

“Software programmers and developers were far and away the most in-demand job employers sought to fill, with nearly 58,000 job postings,” said Amy Carrado, senior director, research and market intelligence at CompTIA. “But there also was robust hiring demand for technology professionals with skills in infrastructure and networking.”

Although London remained the strongest location for vacancies there were plenty of openings in some of the other growing centres in Manchester, Birmingham and Cambridge.

“Not every job posting results in a new hire, and some companies may have multiple postings for the same position but the help-wanted ads are an indicator of the areas where organisations are making their technology investments,” added Carrado.

Year on year the number of IT job postings was down 21% on this time last year but overall the size of the IT workforce in the UK continues to increase with 1.2m employed in the sector by the end of last year. More than 14,000 jobs are expected to be added to that this year and 48,000 by 2023.