The hottest enterprise IT skills in 2017: Most in-demand IT skills in the UK

Evolving threats and data protection needs mean the demand for IT security skills is accelerating at pace as businesses try to avoid joining the growing list of victims of high-profile breaches.

"It's up almost fifty percent on prior year," says Geoff Smith, the managing director of Experis UK & Ireland. "It's driving salaries, it's driving contracts on daily rates up as well. When you look year on year, the average IT security permanent salary is up by five percent. Now that might not sound like a massive amount, but it's double the national average."

The overall demand for security skills surged by 46 percent in the most recent Experis report on the technology sector workforce. Security engineers, consultants, analysts, architects and penetration testers were the most sought after roles.

The increase is particularly significant as it includes many entry level, junior IT security consultant positions.

"Whenever you see a skill set that's rocketing by nigh on 50 percent year on year, it's very rare that supply can meet that demand," says Smith. "The contracted day rate for top-end security consultants can quite easily get up to two, three thousand a day."

Robert Half Technology has experienced similar trends. The recruitment agency’s research revealed that 52 percent of 100 financial services executives surveyed were finding it challenging to find skilled security professionals, the highest percentage of any IT skill set.

"There's a real lack of talent to meet the demands within IT and information security challenges that customers are having," says the company's UK director Neil Owen. "This could be from security engineers through to penetration testers, through to identity access management consultants through to security architects. Across the board, we're seeing people needing IT security skills.

"It has been steadily increasing for a while, but we're certainly starting to see a lot more demand as of the last three-to-six months."

Mobile is another discipline where Experis noticed a big jump in demand. The result is an average salary of £52,053 across the UK, and average contractor day rates of £409.

"The last three or four years, everybody's realising that your interaction points from a customer perspective is largely on the mobile," says Smith. "Even in our space, people don't apply for jobs in a shut window anymore, or even for the newspaper. They're searching and applying on their mobile.

"Everybody's recognising that is your interface now as a company, there's a hell of a lot of development work. That's probably one of our consistently in-demand areas."

A growing focus on data analytics has made big data skills salaries grow to £68,799 for permanent salaries and £548 for contractor day rates in the Experis report.

"Predominately, because it has a business affect," Smith explains. "If an organisation can assess those analytics, and use them wisely, it can drive sales."

The discipline was the only one where the highest permanent salaries aren’t found in London. Edinburgh pushed the capital down to second place, with an average of £74,795 per annum. Such differences, however, are less marked in average day rates at £548. The average permanent salary is £68,799. 

"When we're looking at contractors, contractors will travel, so there isn't too much of a variation with contractors anymore because people will pay to get the talent in," he says. "On a permanent basis, yeah there's always going to be a regional variance."

The cost-effective business benefits offered by cloud services have put the associated skills in high demand. Employees who possess them now earn an average permanent salary of £58,036 according to Experis, and an average day rate of £482.

"Organisations are moving to cloud-based services as opposed to the traditional client-server environments, and owning, and building everything themselves," says Smith. "There's a huge cost drive which is promoting everybody to utilise cloud services."

The growing demand is aligned to that of security skills, as companies put their information into another organisation's hands, which then becomes responsible for hosting and managing it.

Every discipline in the Experis report grew in permanent salary, but the contract rate for web development actually dropped by 0.88 percent, hitting an average daily pay cheque of £484. The average annual wage is still strong at £41,990, and the skills remain popular.

Anything in and around the Microsoft stack continues to be sought-after, namely .NET, C#, and ASP.NET, while skills in JavaScript, CSS, HTML5, PHP and SQL development in particular have experienced a surge in demand.

"I think a lot of the work that's being done is very much front-end development and some of those technologies lend themselves better to front-end products," says Owen.

Emerging tech hubs outside the capital are becoming attractive propositions for web developers looking for new jobs.

"Leeds and Birmingham are two cities that stand out that offer pretty good salaries for good web developers," says Smith. "London just needs to keep an eye out on that, because it can price itself out of the market a little bit with the sheer cost of living."

Clients of both Robert Half and Experis are starting to seek employees who can adapt to the rapid rate at which the most-used programming languages are changing.

"What we are starting to see is that the demand from employers tends to focus on some of those digital know-how skills, and problem-solving skills, and self-learning," says Smith. "They're not necessarily going to have all of the experience, but if they've got the capacity to learn and learn quickly and independently, then that is a critical asset."

"We are also seeing a lot of demand for candidates with a broad blend of skills across multiple technologies," agrees Owen. "As opposed to being an expert in Java or an expert in PHP we're seeing many customers are looking for a blend of multiple programming languages."

Business transformation remains a central focus across all industry sectors and has been driving demand at Robert Half for several years. Research by the recruitment agency revealed that 46 percent of 100 financial services executives surveyed required interim managers in the next 12 months for project management initiatives, and 34 percent for business transformation initiatives.

"We continue to see a demand for project managers or programme managers that are au fait with agile project methodology," says Owen.

"These people are generally getting involved in digital transformation programmes. It might be projects around infrastructure upgrades, certainly moving their infrastructure to the cloud is driving project-related work, and then just vanilla system upgrades."

Business Intelligence (BI) and developers were two of the most in-demand positions in the Robert Half UK Salary Guide 2017. The analysts can now expect a salary of between £44,000 and £56,500 per annum, an increase of 3.1 percent on 2016, and developers one between £44,500 and £69,500, a growth of 2.9 percent.

"There's this real drive within businesses right now to turn data into meaningful content is the feedback we get from our customers," says Owen.

Skills in Tableau, QlikView and Power BI are all in high-demand for front-end development, as are the three components of Microsoft’s SQL Server: Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), and Reporting Services (SSRS).

Experience with machine learning and data science is growing in demand now the novelty factor has been replaced by realistic commercial applications.

"We've started to see more roles around data scientists or heads of data science," says Owen. "I think we'll continue to see that increase.

"What happens is companies start to reorganise and put in a new function, and then they'll start to recruit into that function, so we have started to see a few heads of data scientist roles coming around which will probably then continue demand within that functional line."

"Sometimes when you scratch beneath the surface, they're looking for people with an interest and knowledge of this because it's something they're embarking on," adds Smith.