Average UK tech salary grows to £74,000 a year in 2019

UK technology workers’ average salary increased by 13% in 2019 to reach around £74,000 a year, according to career marketplace Hired.

Its research found that the average salary of tech workers increased over the last year, with those in the tech sector making about £37,000 more than other workers across the UK.

The UK also recorded the highest salary rise worldwide for tech workers in 2019, compared with other tech hotspots such as San Francisco and New York.

Gordon Smith, general manager, Europe at Hired, said: “This data, aside from highlighting some of the trends driving digital transformation globally, is a great motivator for tech talent in the UK, empowering them with insights that will help them to understand current hiring trends and their market worth.

“While salaries for software engineers continue to rise globally, the UK led the way in 2019, cementing the country’s place as one of the world’s top tech hubs. To continue this unparalleled growth in the UK, employers, aside from offering competitive salaries, need to ensure that understanding what top talent want from their jobs is a main priority for hiring managers.”

The UK’s 13% increase in tech salary was bigger than locations such as Toronto, where software engineers saw a 9% increase in average pay, New York, which saw was a 7% average salary rise and San Francisco, where average pay went up by by 6%.

Breaking salaries down by role across the UK, embedded engineers, blockchain engineers and computer vision engineers can now all expect to earn more than £80,000 a year.

Gaming engineers saw the biggest pay increase in 2019 – a 25% rise to an average salary of around £80,000.

Worldwide, 85% of software engineers said they were glad they had chosen that career, and Hired suggested that higher salaries for tech workers shows the health of the UK tech sector despite Brexit.

But many UK firms are concerned about access to technology talent in a post-Brexit world. UK tech talent is also very much centred on the “London Bubble”, with 40% of technology talent staying in the capital.

The government is working to make migration of skilled workers to the UK easier now the country has left the European Union, and has put an emphasis on growing the UK’s own technology talent, partly through a focus on the computing curriculum, which was introduced in 2014 to teach young children more about tech.

Worldwide, 82% of software engineers said new challenges and continuous learning were among the top reasons they had chosen a tech career.

Only half of software engineers globally have a degree in computer science, with one in five claiming to be self-taught coders, according to Hired.

But there has also been a shift in the tech skills needed, with demand for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) talent leaping by 1,400%.

In-demand coding languages are also shifting. Although the most used programming language is JavaScript, Hired found that the most in-demand language worldwide is Google’s Go.

As the pace of change in technology often means a shift in the tech used or how to program it, many people have begun to focus on developing strategies for lifelong learning rather than learning a single skillset, which may become less useful over time.