New digital and technology jobs soar to five year high

Digital sector vacancies are at their highest level for five years, soaring past 132,000 a week in May, as firms look to build their teams to meet the demand for new products and services driven by the pandemic.

According to data compiled by job search engine Adzuna and Dealroom for the Government’s Digital Economy Council, vacancies have recovered sharply from a low of 43,490 last June.

Since February 2021, there have been consistently over 100,000 tech job vacancies a week on Adzuna, amid claims that the UK tech industry is leading the Covid-19 recovery.

Tech and IT-related job vacancies now make up 12% of all open UK job vacancies, boosted significantly by the demand for remote workers.

With ecommerce spending expected to account for more than 30% of total retail sales in the UK in 2021, and digital healthcare also on the rise, the South East is leading when it comes to tech jobs, but the North West and West Midlands are also seeing steady expansion of their tech and IT sectors.

The North West has the third-highest number of IT job vacancies overall by region and Manchester has the highest number of IT vacancies outside of London. Now, 18.4% of all available jobs in the city are in tech.

Birmingham, has the third-highest number of IT vacancies, making up 15.5% of all open job roles in the city. Tech workers in the region can command higher salaries on average, with the average advertised IT salary at £47,664 compared to a regional average of £32,386.

The rise in jobs that involve working is also reflected in the figures; there are nearly 100,000 remote vacancies on Adzuna and 30% of them are for IT jobs.

The figures have almost doubled since September 2020, when the number of general remote vacancies was 47,300. Now, almost one in four (22%) advertised IT vacancies are marked as remote.

The most in-demand tech roles for companies across the UK are software developers, web designers, and data analysts. In April 2021 alone, there were nearly 10,000 vacancies for software developers – 9,783 – compared to 5,630 at the same time last year. Currently, software developer roles make up 1.05% of all advertised UK jobs.

As companies scale up their investment in artificial intelligence, there has been an increase in AI-related job openings including for jobs such as AI engineers, AI programmers and AI data scientists. These AI roles have an average advertised salary of £58,946.

Digital secretary Oliver Dowden said: “The UK tech industry has been critical in keeping people connected and productive over the past year and it’s great to see that UK tech companies are providing dynamic, well-paying jobs across the country. This Government is committed to investing in the digital infrastructure and skills to support this brilliant industry and ensure everyone can access the benefits of technology.”

Facebook vice-president for EMEA Nicola Mendelsohn said: “The scale of hiring by UK tech companies underlines both its strength as a sector but also its status as a global leader alongside Silicon Valley and China. It’s certainly an exciting time to be a part of the industry, with companies across the UK from large organisations like Facebook down to growing start-ups investing in the staff that will help power the next generation of products and services.”