110,000 New UK IT Jobs In 2011

The UK IT industry is looking for 110,000 recruits to fill the expected number of vacancies this year, according to a report from e-Skills, the sector skills council for business and IT.

In the Technology Insights 2011 study, the council reports that one person in 20 of today’s workforce is employed in the IT industry. Just 40 percent are actually working in the IT and telecoms sector and the rest are spread across all other sectors of the economy.

IT Is Fast Becoming A Grey Area

This is a large increase that occurred over the past year and the study predicts that the industry will grow at five times the average rate over the next decade. However despite the increase in numbers to 2010’s level of 1.5 million IT employees, only 18 percent  are women.

What e-Skills finds worrying is that the workforce is ageing and there is a rapidly falling number of new entrants. In 2001, 33 percent of staff were under 30 but this has dwindled to 19 percent. At the other extreme, workers over 50 years old have increased to 17 percent , almost double the 2001 figure.

It is not simply a case of the IT population ageing, e-Skills claimed part of the reason for the change is that employers are showing a preference for experienced workers entering from other sectors, over young recruits fresh from the education system.

Growing demand for expertise

Despite the weakness of the UK economy, demand for IT and telecoms professionals rose in each of the four quarters up to and including the second quarter of 2010. At this point there were around 94,000 advertised positions. Permanent jobs accounted for around 75,000 adverts and somewhere in the region of 18,000 were for contractors.

The report indicates that qualifications are a sticking point. One in ten firms reported gaps in the skills of their IT staff, most often identify their business and technical skills as lacking.

The report concludes: “Moving forward over the next few years, if the skills of IT users are to remain in line with those required by their employers, then over one half of the future training required is predicted to be at significantly higher levels than that which is currently needed.”

The council sees the IT sector as a major contributor to the economy and the recovery. While the industry already contributes £81 billion per year to the UK economy, nine percent of gross value added, Technology Insights believes that, by exploiting the full potential of technology, the rest of the UK economy could be boosted by an additional £50 billion over the next five to seven years.