Information Technology

Technology jobs are among some of the most well-paid jobs in Britain. According to a recent 2018 report conducted by Tech Nation, the technology sector is expanding 2.6 times faster than the rest of the UK economy. The digital tech sector is worth nearly £184 billion to the UK economy, up from £170 billion in 2016.

In Philip Hammond’s 2018 Autumn budget, it was announced that there would be significant increased investment for the tech sector in the months ahead. With the City of London still in top place in the fiercely competitive global financial market arena, a key driver in pushing advancements in technology is the financial services industry. For London to maintain its position as an international financial hub it must be the preeminent hotbed incubator of FinTech. Therefore £800 million pounds has been invested in London-based FinTech start-ups in 2017, which is double 2016’s figure.

Away from FinTech we see a healthy demand for IT skills in other sectors such as in more traditional banking and insurance services, in large pharma and life science companies as well as web development and digital agencies.

Analysing the current 82 open positions BCT has in the technology sector in November 2018, we can gain good insight into the broader environment. The below pie chart represents the distribution of positions we have, grouped by the main technology discipline of each position.

The three largest segments make up almost half of our available jobs. Related positions are paying by far the highest salaries, with numerous roles well into six figure territory. We note that IT security is the largest segment (23%). This stems from many of our end clients being institutions in the banking and insurance industries and the increasing levels of regulation being introduced. A big part of this is now how seriously data privacy is regarded following the introduction of the GDPR earlier this year as well as directives such as MiFID II/MiFIR. Project Management and Business Analysis roles remain strong (13%). We are seeing a rise, as expected in Data centric roles, where emphasis is on skills relating to Big Data, BI & data analytics, and Machine Learning & AI technologies (13%).

JavaScript related openings (vanilla, Node, Ember, React, Angular, jQuery, Vue) are booming (10%) thanks to the wide adoption of JS frameworks to power presentation of data. Interestingly React and Vue are surging ahead in demand, while Angular is dropping.

In terms of the fastest growing development platform, it seems that .Net has the lead (here shown as 6% of our positions), while Java is still in first place for languages required by the banking sector (5%), but Python is just beginning catch up in this respect (5%). Python is naturally also required outside of financial services anywhere where it’s great data analysis focus can be made use of.

Aside from our current open IT positions this month, we should mention some other technologies that are rapidly rising in demand this year with employers.

Cloud computing technologies are coalescing in to ever larger platforms offering the user access to an integrated set of IT solutions, including the Applications (SaaS), Platform (PaaS), and Infrastructure (IaaS) layers. The largest example skillsets within this domain are Microsoft azure cloud computing platform, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon AWS. All these are on our radar as providing potential huge benefits to client organizations and consequently qualified candidates will be highly prized.

Finally, as the robotization of the office is firmly underway, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) skills are receiving much attention from employers. Individuals with experience of implementation of Blue Prism and UiPath variants can expect the greatest attention.