It’s official. The green shoots of recovery in the technology industry are emerging. This past week vacancies hit levels only seen previously a handful of times in the past year. After a challenging 2023, where VC/PE funding became significantly harder to obtain (TMT deals fell 24% on the year before, to the lowest levels in five years) looking ahead, the signs are positive and London in particular is picking the pace.
As Europe’s most advanced e-commerce market, the UK has approximately 60 million e-commerce users. With that, shopping online has become the norm, which has had implications for retailers on the high street, especially outside of main shopping hubs, where the pandemic period had resulted in a significant surge in activity. Now, post-pandemic, there has been a slowdown as the market has normalized, which has meant that when looking at e-commerce, there has been a drop of 42.5% in IT vacancies compared to 2022, according to the latest UK Tech Report by Talent Alpha and Vacancysoft.
The slowdown in the technology sector has generally also been felt in gaming, with this year being 55.8% down on last year. Nonetheless, 2023 is 31% up on 2019, showing the underlying trend is upward. As a result, Gaming has hit 5.4% of all vacancies across tech companies, up from 3.5% in 2019 according to the latest UK Technology Labour market trends report by Talent Alpha and market data analysts Vacancysoft.
Despite the fact vacancies have dropped in 2023 versus 2022, we see this as a temporary lull, as the attack vector is bigger than ever before. IT security vacancies are expected to total approximately 4,187 for the year, marking a 30.7% decrease from the 6,045 vacancies observed in 2022. Equally, at the same time, IT security has increased in share of all IT vacancies, from 4.1% last year, to 4.7%, making it one of the fastest-growing segments. This is according to the latest UK Technology Labour Market Trends report by Robert Walters and market data analysts Vacancysoft.
When examining the overall half-year totals for 2023, we can see a substantial 54.2% decrease when compared to the same period in 2022, where across all sectors, companies have been slowing down.
