The economy may be in an overall shambles for many people, but freelancers and umbrella company contractors working in the IT field wouldn’t know it.
In fact, new job billings in information technology – a field that has used interim and temporary workers for years and shows no signs of changing that trend – have risen to such highs that the UK’s current economic woes would be barely discernible if you looked at the raw figures. In fact, the number of jobs in the IT field currently looking for skilled and qualified workers has reached levels nearly indistinguishable from 2008 figures.
There’s only a 15 per cent difference between IT professional job billings today and five years ago, and considering how absolutely horrid it’s been from an economic standpoint this is nothing short of remarkable if you ask me. It’s not so easy to forget how rampant wage freezes and job losses nearly crippled the UK economy in the wake of the global credit crisis, so a 15 per cent difference – in the face of such rampant economic disaster – is exemplary in and of itself, for what it’s worth.
Experts say that firms are in a much better position to expand their IT departments and provide additional resources to the rest of their other internal departments by hiring on additional support staff, both permanent workers and contractors alike. According to their research software developers and consultancy firms have undergone the largest amount of growth and have since increased the available It roles by around 1.4 per cent in order to provide greater emphasis on consumer technology development and fulfilling the needs of clients who require IT workers on a per-project basis rather than a permanent working relationship.
It’s heartening to know that there’s plenty of hope for the UK economy, at least where IT contracting is concerned. Yes we’re far from getting through the woods completely, but I think we’re through the last of it provided we don’t have any more horror shows in the EU, which is the main source of instability at the moment – it’s probably a very good thing that the UK stubbornly clung to our own monetary standard instead of transitioning over to the Euro standard, considering how much trouble countries such as Greece would be in if they decided to drop the new currency and return to their own in an attempt to rebuild their own economy.
