Demand for IT Pros continues to fall

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Fewer IT jobs are being advertised, but it’s not all bad news for the sector.

According to numbers from IT body e-skills, the demand for IT staff fell by 24 per cent in the last quarter of 2008 to 98,000 openings, with contractor vacancies diving 27 per cent to 23,000.

That said, the unemployment rate for IT workers has fallen, with the number of such workers being employed at its highest level in seven years.

Indeed, companies are still struggling to find systems developers, IT managers and programming or systems designers, with the most sought after skills including SQL, C/C# and .NET.

“An interesting quarter this one - on the one hand when considering the ICT labour market we have a steady stream of media reports outlining ICT job losses in the UK... yet on the other, we have a growing number of ICT staff in employment (now at its highest level for over seven years), a barely notable change in the number of ICT staff going through the redundancy process, and a fall in the unemployment rate for ICT staff more generally,” the group said in its quarterly bulletin.

The bulletin said that IT faced “uncertain” times, but added: “[In] ICT terms at least, things were not as bad at the end of the year as we may have originally thought.”

If that’s too optimistic for you, click here to read our roundup of IT job losses.

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