Improvement in IT contractor job prospects

Although this can be perceived as good news, Hugo Sellert, head of economic research at Monster Worldwide, said that it was too early to draw conclusions that hiring trends have completely turned around in the IT sector.

He pointed out that in comparison to this time last year; IT vacancies have dropped by 23%. In fact they have dropped 45% since their highest point in February last year. Mr Sellert confirmed that last month IT vacancies actually bottomed out. Vacancies are increasing at a relatively slow rate and redundancies are continuing.

Sellert said that turnover in the recruitment market generally decreases during times of economic crisis as employees believe it is harder to change jobs. They are much more likely to remain in their present post until things start to improve. As optimism begins to return to the economy, more employees start to think about changing jobs so there is a greater need for replacements.

While other surveys have confirmed a rise in hiring intentions, Sellert suggests that "it could take some time" before this translates to online vacancies.

An increase in the number of redundancies has caused extensive candidate availability in recent months. This is backed up by data from TotalJobs.com who report 148,000 applications across 15,000 IT jobs advertised in September. That's nearly 10 applicants per job. This is not due to an increase in users of the site, but rather to a decrease of around two-thirds in employment opportunities in the IT sector over the past twelve months.

Last month Global IT research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) and Microsoft Corp. released the results of global research, finding that the information technology (IT) industry is expected to create 5.8 million new jobs and more than 75,000 new businesses over the next four years. The expected growth rate for IT employment of 3 percent a year is more than three times the rate of growth of total employment and a strong indicator that investing in IT will contribute to economic recovery and growth.

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