IT Job Market Continues to Improve

Demand for candidates with ICT skills in the UK now outstrips supply, according to Sector Skills Council e-skills.

The latest Labour Market Bulletin from e-skills shows that the number of advertised vacancies for ICT staff rose for the fifth consecutive quarter to a total of 101,000 positions, while the unemployment rate for ICT staff fell to 3.1% as opposed to 8.3% for the workforce as a whole.

This news tallies with the large number of graduate vacancies being advertised recently at cumbria.prospects.ac.uk

For a closer look at the IT labour market, visit www.e-skills.com/Research/Research-publications/Labour-Market-Bulletin to download the full version of the Bulletin.

What are IT companies looking for?

Some answers came out from a recent careers adviser meeting with four major companies:

Technical Skills

SAP / ERP technologies, methodologies such as Agile, languages such as .NET and C#. If you can demonstrate a good grasp of a language like Java you can probably pick up other languages quite easily.

Communication, influencing and the ability to self-market seem to be as important as numerical and technical skills.

Degree Classification

A bit of a split - about half of the companies recruiting stipulate a 2.1 Not very positive about PhD students but a masters in some sort of IT conversion course can be good if students demonstrate passion for IT.