IT vacancies fall but demand for some skills remains

Vacancies in the IT sector dropped by 76 per cent over the last year, but some IT skills are still in high demand.

A survey of IT jobs advertised in business magazines, recruitment web sites and national and regional press showed there were just 52,000 vacancies in the final quarter of 2002, compared to 151,000 at the beginning of the year.

The quarterly surveys, conducted by CWJobs.co.uk, looked at over 395,000 job adverts in the course of the past year.

In the last quarter of the year there were more than 37 times more IT jobs advertised on the Internet than in newspapers and magazines, proving that the most popular place to find IT jobs is online.

Despite the general downturn in vacancies there was still a demand for specific IT skills. SQL was the most sought-after skill while C++, which was top of the list for the previous two years, fell to second place.

Unix, which had been the second most desired skill in the previous two years, was the third most in demand skill in 2002.

The top ten IT skills are:

1. SQL
2. C++
3. Unix
4. Office
5. Windows NT
6. C
7. Oracle
8. Visual Basic
9. Java
10. TCP/IP

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