IT hiring trends 2017: IoT, cyber security and data science - What this means for IT recruitment in 2017

Despite uncertainty surrounding the UK's decision to leave the European Union the annual Job Market Report by technology career site Dice showed that 78 percent of the 1,100 tech professionals surveyed were positive about their career prospects for the year. A massive 62 percent of permanent IT staff expect their salary to rise in the year ahead, and 59 percent of contractors expect the same.

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This is reflected by the CompTIA IT Industry Business Confidence Index, which was released in January. This showed that the UK IT industry forecasts a growth of 4.2 percent, which is in line with global expectations despite uncertainty.

Research by global IT industry body CompTIA (using stats from Burning Glass Labour Insights and the ONS) showed that UK IT staff job postings have increased 10 percent year-on-year at 1.3 million IT job postings.

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The Dice Job Market Report showed that half of technology professionals earn over £40,000 a year, one percent up from 2015. However, the report also showed that the majority of permanent IT staff (36 percent) earn between £20-40,000. Another worrying trend saw IT contractors' pay decrease by 21 percent over the past year. 

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The Robert Half 2017 Salary Guide showed that salaries are "increasing at a rate reflective of skills deficit in the market and the digitisation agenda."

"Candidates with five-plus years' experience are being offered salary levels on par with those with 10-plus years' experience," the report reads.

Developer salaries are steadily rising, up 4.5 percent year-on-year to £27,500-48,000.

The Dice Job Market Report showed that 91 percent of UK IT contractors are male, a hugely worrying figure for diversity. This is worse, from a diversity standpoint, than 2016, which was an 88 to 12 percent divide between men and women. Permanent IT employees fared little better at 90 percent male, up from 87 percent in 2016.

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In 2016 just four percent of contractors were in the 18-24 year old bracket, now it is five percent, and the biggest segment is now 35-44 at 33 percent, instead of 45-54 at 35 percent in 2016.

The Tech Cities Job Watch Q4 report for 2016 by IT recruitment specialists Experis showed that permanent staff with cyber security skills are increasingly in-demand, in part due to the growth of the internet of things (IoT) and the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reform.

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The report shows that in Q4 of 2016 demand for IT security skills rose to 46 percent, meaning a total of 4,442 permanent roles were advertised, which is a year-on-year increase in demand of a staggering 53 percent. In terms of job titles, security engineers, security consultants, penetration testers, security analysts and security architects are most in demand.

The Robert Half 2017 Salary Guide showed 90 percent of IT directors saying that finding the right technology professionals was a challenge, especially for security roles.

For IT pros this means better salaries, with annual IT security permanent salaries rising across ten key UK cities by five percent, peaking at £62,596 on average in London, compared to a rise of just 0.62 percent for contractor day rates, peaking at £586 in Edinburgh.

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The Robert Half 2017 Salary Guide showed that the highest percentage change is salary in technology was for the role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), up four percent to between £104,250-£153,500. Lower down the food chain information security managers and officers are both up around two percent year-on-year and security network engineer salaries are up nearly three percent to £34,750-£53,750.

Hired's 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries report showed the average software engineer salary in the Bay Area on Hired was $134,000, compared to London which was $73,000 (£56,000).

The report was created by Hired’s data scientist Dr. Jessica Kirkpatrick working from a data set of 280,000 interview requests and job offers from 2016 across the platform.

Hired's report also showed that product managers bring in the highest average salary of anyone using its platform, at $138K. The UK mirrors this by also coming out top at $83K (£64K) on average in 2016.

The Hired report shows that while data science salaries lag product managers at £56,000, these are rising at a rate of 5.2 percent year-on-year.

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The Tech Cities Job Watch Q4 report showed that what it classifies as Big Data roles continue to draw the largest salaries, averaging £68,799 across ten key UK cities, £71,521 in London and peaking at £74,795 in Edinburgh.

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Developer community Stack Overflow analysed its job website and found that the fastest growing skill for UK and Irish developers from 2012-2016 was the JavaScript framework AngularJS.

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Java, Python and AWS were the second, third and fourth fastest-growing skills sought by employers, according to the data.