The UK has come out on top when it comes to the information technology sector – and that includes the number of IT umbrella company contractors as well.
Quickly, now – when you think of the number of IT workers in the UK as a percentage of the overall workforce, what figure do you come up with? One per cent? Two per cent? You would be wrong if you did – apparently a record-busting 3.4 per cent of all Brits in the workforce work in the information technology field.
Or at least that’s what Procorre says. The professional services consultancy firm just finished crunching some major numbers, coming out with a research study that indicated which countries in Europe had more IT workers than others, and it turns out that the UK is far and above the 2 per cent average for the entire EU.
What does this mean? Well Brits are up on top – and while there are plenty of IT start ups and technology firms out there that have traditional employees, there’s also shedloads of companies that make use of IT contractors and freelancers as well. Not only that, but British IT worker figures are far and above other major EU nations – the Netherlands only came in at 2.6 per cent, and those diligent Germans could only muster 2.7 per cent. I’ll wager that this revelation gets good old Angela Merkel’s trousers in a bit of a twist!
So where are all these IT workers flocking to? They can’t all be working in Silicon Roundabout, can they? Well they’re not. Sure, there’s shedloads of them in London but there are other pockets of tech activity throughout the UK in places like Swindon, Gloucester, Bristol, Scotland and Cambridge to name a few. Wherever you go it seems there’s a great chance that you’ll be able to find work if you’re a British IT professional – and that of course says nothing about the chances of getting outsourced to a lucrative project overseas. With a lack of IT workers in other EU countries, who’s to say that our neighbours across the Channel might not need some major help on some tricky IT projects – and that they’ll turn to British IT workers for the expertise and experience they have in building and maintaining all sorts of technological infrastructures like server farms and things of that nature?
