July 2008

Demand slowing for senior staff?

Demand for IT management and software skills has decreased as IT projects that won’t deliver an immediate return on investment are shelved or put on hold until business conditions improve, said Karen Geldenhuys, MD of ICT-focused recruitment company, Abacus Recruitment.

“This situation seems to be the case both in the UK and in South Africa, where both economies are going through tough times. But in South Africa there is a double whammy because, due to our black empowered policies, many white senior IT workers are not being employed – and there is a dearth of senior black IT workers.”

According to UK-based on-line publication, WWW.contractorUK, agents at ReThink Recruitment said that the number of IT jobs it advertised for managers and application developers has fallen by 30% and 18% respectively since 2006.

The report said that fewer new jobs emerging in these and other senior IT roles will remain as long as "financial uncertainty" keeps compelling clients to postpone their non-revenue generating projects.

"Where there is a less clear-cut business case some IT projects are being put on the back burner and that is leading to a softening in demand for some management and software development roles.

"[But] we are talking about fewer new jobs here, not mass redundancies," the agency said, "so there is no sense of a return to the post-dot com market when huge numbers of contractors were laid off."

Meanwhile, adverts for IT support roles tracked by ReThink now make up 30.1% of all the technology jobs advertised on online job boards, compared to 24% two years ago.

Geldenhuys said research shows that this is partly because offshoring has become less economically attractive as wage inflation in India has crept up, but also because “offshorers” have created jobs onshore.