IT contractors' index score at three-year low

A growing reluctance to hire people permanently is yet to turn into a shoo-in for freelance IT contractors, as their demand index is at its lowest score for three years.

Updating the index yesterday, the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) scored IT contractor demand at 52.9, the smallest figure for such workers since April 2013.

That means demand for IT contractors still grew in April 2016 – albeit just slightly, as the index only returns scores higher than 50.0 when demand is greater than it was in the previous month.

It also means that IT contractors are now bottom of the REC’s professional temp league table, as eight other occupations of contractor all saw more growth in demand for their services last month.

It is these contractors – working in roles ranging from engineers and accountants to hoteliers and carers – who the confederation’s boss must have had most in mind when he said yesterday:

“Employers are turning to temps and contractors to provide a flexible resource, as a way of hedging any possible change to the UK’s relationship with Europe.”

Kevin Green, who is the REC’s CEO also said: “A possible Brexit and the impact of the National Living Wage [are] changing employer behaviour with a switch from permanent to temporary hiring.”

Further confounding why the favouring of freelance staff isn’t translating into more of a boost for IT freelancers is a long list of IT skills that employers can’t find in the permanent market.

In fact, April saw a shortage of candidates for IT jobs requiring BA, BI, Development, Embedded Software Engineering, .Net, Java, Oracle, Project Management and SQL Server.

However, six of those don’t have enough freelance practitioners either, notably BA, BI, Development, .Net and SQL Server, as all of these skills were “scarce” among contractors too.