You’re quite lucky if you’re a freelancer or an umbrella contractor working in the media or information technology fields in the current day and age!
Or you are if you believe the latest research study conducted by the Association of Professional Staffing Companies. The new report from the trade industry body highlighted how recruitment specialists are especially keen to fill marketing and media vacancies right alongside the already well-publicised IT sector’s dire need for skilled and qualified professionals.
Permanent placements in the media sector have fallen like a rock over the last 12 months, with a 21 per cent decline in just one short year. Meanwhile, the number of vacant billings actually increased by two percentage points, leaving recruitment professionals in the particularly untenable position of trying to find a permanent worker that matches the needs of any given firm.
Yet there’s still hope according top APSCo, especially when it comes to the burgeoning temporary worker industry. Freelancers and umbrella workers alike are flocking to these positions, and companies are snapping up these contract workers as fast as they can in order to remain competitive and continue whatever growth they can manage in these terrible economic times.
Honestly it was only a matter of time before the IT sector’s woes spread to other industries, if you ask me. Skills shortages are becoming more and more commonplace, especially within the permanent workforce; what’s causing this is a bit of a mystery, but personally I think it’s because so many former permanent employees ended up transitioning over to a flexible working model after the 2008 economic crisis out of necessity, only to find much more success in their freelance career than they ever did working under the yoke of a permanent employment contract.
Of course there could be other issues at play here as well, the most likely one being a lack of proper professionally educated younger Brits moving into the workforce. This simply can’t be discounted when it comes to why there’s so many billings yet so few workers to fill them; the only way to solve an issue as serious as this would be to completely overhaul our educational system here in the UK, but we all know how well that would go: much like a lead balloon, it would sink to the bottom of the North Sea – probably right next to one of those offshore oil platforms that, incidentally, is in terrible need of skilled and qualified workers!
