IT Contractor Daily Pay Continues To Increase
Daily pay rates for IT contractors are up and look set to stay that way into 2015, according to a recent article on Contractor UK, written by a senior analyst at Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).
PAC's figures show that there has been an average daily pay rise of 1.2% from 2013 to this year. While this isn't a vast amount, the database can be used to predict figures for 2015 and shows that IT contractors will be even better paid next year than they are currently.
This upwards shift is partly due to improvements in the UK's overall economy, which have led to a greater number of operations and therefore created a supply-and-demand situation.
However, there is some disparity to this as the Office for National Statistics, Barclays and RBS all offered their IT contractors so-called 'take-it-or-leave-it' rate reductions in the first quarter of 2014.
Whilst this ties in with Contractor UK's research into public sector IT services rates, which showed a decline in 2013/14, they also found that the financial services industry was the biggest driver of IT service rate increases in 2014.
In order to explain this difference, the article looks at trends within the wider IT services market. By looking at the 'solution' area (technology platforms, for example) it would seem that back-office and commoditised areas show little rate growth; whilst those in BI, CRM and SCM/SRM storm well ahead.
The increased daily rate for these front-office areas can be linked to budget increases in Analytics and Digital Transformation. With confidence in the UK economy remaining low, IT spending is being forced to slacken slightly. This means that any investment is being targeted towards areas most likely to give organisations a competitive edge – namely, Analytics and Digital Transformation.
As it happens, these two areas also happen to have a fairly critical IT skills shortage, meaning that average rates rise as a result of demand for these specific technologies.