IT pro wages in North hardest hit by credit crunch

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The credit crunch is starting to bite into UK IT professional salaries, according to new data released this week.

IT professionals in the North of England have been hardest hit as their pay has decreased by 1.7 per cent in the past year, according to data obtained from e-Skills UK.

IT staffing company, ReThink Recruitment noted that, while actual wage decreases were relatively rare, this drop had also widened the IT pay gap between the North of England and London for the first time in two years.

The data showed that salaries for IT professionals in the North of England shrunk down to an average of £29,380 per year. This compares with a 1.2 per cent increase in wages in London to an average of £45,240, which means IT workers in the North now earn 65 per cent of London wages, compared to 67 per cent of London wages in 2007.

This was also in contrast to last year, where e-Skills data showed that IT wages in the North grew 27 per cent faster than IT wages in London.

Michael Bennett, ReThink Recruitment's director, said that London’s financial sector had taken the brunt of the fallout from the credit crunch. “But the capital's IT staff, many of whom work for financial institutions, are proving more resilient to the downturn than their counterparts in the North,” he added.

The recruiter reasoned that Northern IT-based jobs were more vulnerable than those based in London. This was because the concentration of data processing and IT support functions in the North tended to be lower skilled than London IT jobs and, therefore, were more easily outsourced to offshore IT centres in countries like India as organisations look to reduce costs.

Bennett added: “IT staff that are able to boost the bottom line tend to be more highly skilled and therefore less likely to be threatened by offshore competition."

The e-Skills stats also showed that the overall wage growth for IT professionals in the UK stood at 3.4 per cent, lagging behind the UK’s overall six per cent wage growth rate.

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