One out of every three IT professionals, both permanent and contract workers alike, have been experiencing a massive workload increase over the past 12 months.
More than a third of IT contract workers and permanent staff have seen workloads that dwarf those of just a short year ago, with the broad consensus being that for every five days of work, they’re completing somewhere around seven and a half days’ worth of projects on a weekly basis. Mike Beresford, managing director for Randstad, the recruitment specialist that undertook the survey, commented on the findings, stating that IT freelancers and permanent workers alike are feeling the heat.
The long-term sustainability of a strategy involving fewer IT workers taking on the weighty task of finishing the same amount of work as a fully-staffed business is relatively nil, according to Mr Beresford. The problem is that businesses are highly reluctant to take on more permanent staff with the current state of the UK economy, leading them to drive their smaller staff of IT workers harder in order to remain competitive.
Of course, there are many companies that have heavily invested in umbrella service contractors as a way to counteract the expense of employing permanent staff. Freelancers working in the IT service industry have seen a massive increase in demand for their services as a result, but there are still many businesses that are so concerned with the bottom line that they don’t even hire workers on an interim basis to help ease the load for their permanent workers.
Doing so is almost undoubtedly a mistake, said Mr Beresford, as overworked IT professionals tend to burn out and begin to make mistakes due to excess levels of stress – and the expense of rectifying a massive IT problem caused by human error is much higher than simply taking on a few extra contractors.
