Contractors’ Questions: What other IT skills are sought-after in London?

Contractor’s Question: Which contract IT skills are actively needed in London, other than security and development?

Expert’s Answer: The hiring of Data, Business Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on a contract basis in London is at an all-time high, primarily within the healthcare, consulting and financial services industries.

Job seekers with a Masters degree or PhD in artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning or computer science are high in demand for these types of roles.

Data engineers, analysts and scientists are required across all facets of the data hiring landscape, with skills in Hadoop, R, Python, SAS, SQL/NoSQL, Scala and Spark specifically in high demand. Spark seems to be the most popular big data processing tool, however Apache's open source stream processing framework Flink is a growing competitor.

Traditional Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing tools are still in demand as Big Data tools and techniques are still to be further developed to meet data governance standards, this is also linked to the increased uptake in visualisation tools such as Tableau, Power BI and Qlik.

Within the financial services sector, analytics roles are at an all-time high, and we have seen a notable trend in analytics being utilised within Audit functions, as well as record highs in Compliance focusing on fraud detection and anti-money laundering. Communication skills are increasingly important to companies as these roles are often the bridge between business stakeholders and technical development teams.

In terms of pay in London, a data scientist working in financial services can command rates of £450, £600 and £825 a day for junior, mid-level and senior level expertise, respectively. And a Business Analyst can fetch up to £700 (senior level) a day, compared with a Business Analyst in commerce and industry (so non-financial services) of up to £600 a day.

The expert’s answer is based on an extract from the 2018 IT Salary Guide of London recruitment agency Morgan McKinley.