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News & Views

Businesses need to budget for tech talent

Tech skills shortages are once again in the spotlight as data from specialist recruitment firm, Robert Half reveals that the industry is on the cusp of a hiring boom.  But with average pay packets for entry-level roles within cloud computing hitting £70,000 and overall average pay in tech currently at 55% more than the national average, businesses will clearly need to ‘budget’ for top salaries if they want top tech talent.

According to Robert Half’s 2024 Salary Guide – which analyses and reports on market salaries, hiring trends, and skills requirements across the UK – 75% of tech hiring managers are confident in their organization’s growth prospects this year, with 50% of firms indicating that they plan to add new positions for permanent full-time employees with a further 35% say they intend to bring more temporary talent on board this year to aid growth plans.  

“Last year may have seen the technology sector impacted by layoffs in larger firms, but demand for the implementation of software and cloud applications to fuel digital transformation is still buoyant.  This is likely to boost the SME tech sector, where most technical partners and software implementers are located,” comments Kris Harris, Regional Director, UK Technology Solutions, Robert Half.  “As we leave a shallow recession and the country’s growth speeds up after Q1, increasing demand for skilled top tech talent is on the cards.  The consequence could be pay inflation from candidates in a tight, skills-short labour market who know their worth when it comes to the digital transformation agenda and those particularly hit by recent redundancies who are likely to expect the incentives to which they have become accustomed.  With salaries already very healthy for the most in-demand tech jobs, employers will need to dig deep and create ‘a total reward’ talent attraction package to support recruitment.”

Robert Half’s 2024 Salary Guide statistics show a healthy rate of pay rises for IT jobs when compared to 2023 figures.  Applications Support roles under the job category of Software development and testing reported the greatest increase in salaries (24%) between the 2023 and 2024 reports.  Transformation Product Managers, First Line Support specialists in Cloud and Infrastructure and Data Analysts also reported high levels of pay increases of 14%, 14% and 10% respectively.
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