Market Outlook 2002: IT market showing signs of recovery
Certain areas of the IT recruitment market are showing the initial signs of a recovery, according to Daniel Elkins, CEO of the skills exchange website, TheSkillsMarket.
The latest contractor rates (per hour) for the IT sector, according to TheSkillsMarket, are as follows...
Rank Skill Rate 1 OO Analysis and Design £52.82 2 MS Project £51.05 3 Application Integration £50.71 4 JAVA £49.86 5 UNIX £48.40 6 Systems Testing £44.58 7 XML £44.52 8 Visual Studio £43.75 9 MS Visual Basic £42.40 10 VB Script £42.25 11 DHTML £42.11 12 COBOL £41.97 13 JCL £41.91 14 JavaScript £40.88 15 HTML £37.71
The top 10 skills by demand are:
Rank Skill 1 JAVA 2 C++ 3 UNIX 4 MS Visual Basic 5 Oracle 6 J2EE 7 XML 8 HTML 9 OO Analysis and Design 10 MS Visual C++
Daniel Elkins, TheSkillsMarket's CEO, said: "After a very depressed fourth quarter in 2001, it looks as if certain areas of the IT recruitment market are showing the initial signs of a recovery.
"Many companies had put off, or cancelled large projects, due to budget constraints and an uncertain market, concentrating instead on keeping a skeleton staff to retain business critical systems.
"Since the beginning of 2002, we've already noticed a trend in both our own skills analysis and external job adverts towards more project management and business analyst roles. This suggests that new projects are being initiated, as these are always the first roles to be filled. This will no doubt be followed by a demand for developers and finally testing resource towards the end of the project lifecycle.
"It is important to note the current emphasis on demand for Project Managers 'with a proven track record of delivering projects on time and to budget' which will come as no surprise to anybody. It certainly looks like the finance directors will have a lot more control on the purse strings this year.
"For other areas, the demand for experienced developers with core programming skills such as JAVA and C++ still remains strong."
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Richard Powell, UKTECH