After the lull between April & June 2020, overall hiring in the UK recovered sharply in the July-Sep quarter, when it made a strong comeback. 1mn new jobs were listed on various job sites underlining the improved demand primarily driven by the Healthcare & Tech sectors. 90K jobs were published each week on an average in August, 2020. This jumpstart was the beginning of a strong recovery which went beyond H1, 2021. 110K tech jobs were listed in Feb 2021, an overall increase of 33% from the lows of April, 2020. This recovery in demand for tech talent was seen to be emanating from Cybersecurity, Cloud, IT Support, Coding & Development, Data Analytics, AI, Web Design and UX domains with a particularly high demand for Ruby developers and Java specialists. Post-pandemic peak, the deep-tech start-ups went on a hiring spree and is responsible for the current momentum – in fact, the UK start-up space has an unfilled requirement for 60K developers.
The distinct drivers for the tailwind are
a) Faster shift to remote working, now evolving in to a more mature model ‘Hybrid Work’
b) Uptick in sales activities and restarting of stalled projects
c) Increased digital transformation play
d) Need for a digital-ready workforce in the UK
3mn new tech jobs are expected to be created in the UK by 2025, with 15% of these belonging to the Cloud & Data category, according to estimates. The UK is set to witness a 4.5X growth in Cloud jobs across all industry groups from the current ~100K. Higher adoption of the Cloud by the Government (‘Cloud-First’, GBP 7bn in cloud contracts signed since 2012) and high-value private sector contracts will lead the market as catalysts for talent demand growth. 31K Cloud jobs are expected in the Financial Services sector, followed by the Healthcare sector with 12,700 jobs. 19K Azure jobs were advertised in H1, 2021 versus 17K for AWS jobs. Similarly 40% of all cloud jobs advertised in the UK had AWS as the key skill, while 47% belonged to Azure. There is a high-volume demand for DevOps & Agile skills – 50% of all cloud category jobs have a requirement for DevOps. Job seeker searches for Azure grew 9X between 2015 and 2020.
The UK cloud services market is poised for rapid growth arising out of business continuity & transformation needs and Cloud is expected to play a major role in achieving the medium to long term goals.
