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No more layoffs? UK tech job market jumps
There are encouraging signs of a recovery in London’s tech market as job vacancies increase over the summer.
After an 18-month period characterised by large layoffs, and even talk of artificial intelligence disrupting the tech jobs market, the spectre of a recovery is here.
The number of new tech job roles in London, the dominant European hub for technology firms, increased by 10 per cent in June and 26 per cent in May.
More than a quarter (28 per cent) of these roles were for software developers and engineers and 29 per cent of all tech roles advertised in London come from the banking and financial services sector.
In 2023, the volume of new tech roles across two of the largest UK banks NatWest and Lloyds has increased by 72.5 per cent and 48.4 per cent, respectively.
The data, which comes from a new report from recruitment specialists Robert Walters and jobs market intelligence firm Vacancysoft, highlights a potential levelling off a downward trend initiated in late 2021.
It was towards the end of 2022 though, when some of the most testing times came for tech workers.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced 12,000 job losses in January.
In March 2023 the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent shockwaves through the market.
In April tech giant Meta laid off 4,000 employees.
In London tech job roles within tech companies plummeted by -50.4 per cent in April and in non-tech firms by -37 per cent, according to the report.
“Whilst it is great to see job volume increase in the past few months, it would be amiss to not acknowledge that demand for technology professionals sky-rocketed during and post-pandemic – so a lot the decline we are seeing in roles is more so a levelling out process, where job vacancies now are on-par with what we saw pre-Covid (2019),” said Ben Litvinoff, associate director, technology at Robert Walters.
“The early signs of job flow returning is linked to considered and business-critical hires, the return of transformation and change projects which may have been put on hold at the start of this year, and investor activity slowly returning leading to a rise in demand for developers and infrastructure specialists,” he added.
