While the government may be scaling back employment opportunities, the NHS has been been bucking the trend by calling for more umbrella service workers to keep up with demand, according to one recruitment industry bigwig.
Recruitment firm Max20’s managing director, Don Tomlinson, said in a recent interview that NHS trusts are fighting tooth-and-nail for the best IT and information management professionals like hungry dogs over a scrap of meat. the NHS is rapidly becoming commercialised, thanks to Health Informatics Services organisations and Clinical Commissioning Groups, leading to demand spiking for freelancers with the correct skills needed to fill these positions.
The interim working sector is chugging along quite well despite the otherwise rather miserable economy, and not just in the health services sector. Overall, IT contracting placements have gone up by 16 per cent from July of 2011, but the NHS has definitely led the charge by being able to offer umbrella company contractors highly complex tech projects with excellent pay; trusts have quickly learnt the benefits of employing contract workers to fill key IT staffing positions in order to keep hospitals and surgeries operating at top efficiency.
In fact, there are more and more permanent workers abandoning their old ways of earning a living and diving headfirst into the world of freelance contracting, either because people have become fed up with their current permanent position or because job losses have forced skilled workers into finding employment wherever they can. Whatever the motivation, freelancers are indeed growing in number in the UK and have been hailed as the heartbeat of the UK’s economic recovery efforts.
