One year ago, the world was still reeling from the raw impact of 11 September and security on every level was a priority. In terms of IT skills, disaster recovery and storage featured prominently, although the chief executive of EMC criticised other storage companies for exploiting the terrorist attacks.
Twelve months later the economic downturn in the tech sector continued with talk of recovery being a distant prospect. Job losses have continued on a large scale especially in the telecom sector. WorldCom, Cable & Wireless, Marconi, Siemens, Lucent, Nortel and Orange all cut staff heavily in 2002.
The telecoms sector has become so out of favour even the annual show 'Networks Telecom' has been rebranded as 'Networks for Business'.
Modest upturn
Research by e-skills in their quarterly bulletin shows the UK IT market experiencing a modest upturn during the final months of 2002, with anticipated growth in 2003 of 4 percent. A comparison to a year ago points to a decrease of 127,000--or 12 percent--of people employed in ICT as whole.
Contractors
IT contractors in 2002 experienced drops in hourly rates of pay in four out of 49 job roles monitored by the Computer Weekly/SSP Quarterly Survey.
The most significant decreases were for Webmasters, and in content creation where rates dropped by 34 percent. System administrator contractors had their rates cut by 20 percent, as did PC helpdesk workers.
Contractors fortunate enough to have hourly rates increases were technical authors with increases of 8 percent; senior database admin/analysts up 5 percent; and network/comms analyst/engineers up by 3 percent.
Another area with a predicted upswing is in the public sector, which, despite a reputation for poor pay and conditions, may be contractors' best bet for steady work.
7%
11%
