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Skills shortage at two-year low
But soft skills are still lacking for the IT crowd

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Thursday 26 April 2007

The IT skills shortage is at a two-year low as UK employers are finding it easier to net people to fill tech roles, according to e-skills UK.

Only six per cent of IT recruiters surveyed reported difficulties finding staff with the required tech skills, qualifications or experience in the third quarter of 2006 - making this the second lowest figure in two years, the quarterly research by the UK IT industry group reveals.

IT Skills most and least in demand in Q3 2006

Demand falls by 25 per cent or more:
♦  Fourth-generation programming language
♦  Application programming interface
♦  Active template library
♦  Computer Graphics Interface
♦  Corba
♦  Framemaker
♦  Frame relay
♦  Informix
♦  Object Oriented Architecture
♦  Pick
♦  Powerbuilder
♦  Powerhouse
♦  Rational Rose
♦  Sendmail
♦  Virtual memory system

Demand for skills rose by 25 per cent or more:
♦  Arcserve
♦  Fireworks
♦  Hubs
♦  Java class library
♦  Navision
♦  RPG400
♦  Synchronous digital hierarchy
♦  Wiki mark-up language

The IT crowd needs to buff up its non-technical skills in particular as one-third of IT recruiters said the levels of interpersonal and other non-technical skills held by candidates were below that required by their business.

One in seven employers also criticised candidates applying for a non-technical role - for a lack of knowledge of spreadsheets and databases.

Flash and Winrunner were both skills in continuous demand from IT employers over the last five quarters for permanent positions, according to the research.

By contrast, demand for contractors with Extranet, Ingress, MFC, Object Oriented Architecture, Perl and Visual Basic skills continued to fall during the third quarter of the year - the fourth such consecutive drop.

Bluetooth, C and C# were all named as skills increasingly needed by IT contractors, with demand for these skills increasing steadily over the first three quarters of 2006.