I’ve been reading all these reports in the press about how great the UK job market is at the moment. Low unemployment, well-paid positions left unfilled, training schemes unable to find students etc.

In your experience (as a boss, worker, or jobseeker), how accurate are these reports? I’m asking because there’s a high probability that I’ll be returning to the UK in the new year after spending two years in Spain trying to find a wine industry job. Due to a combination of Coronavirus and an awful job market here, I’ve been unable to find anything other than low-paid English teaching jobs, and I’m really keen to get back on the career ladder.

I’m looking for a job in the beer / wine / spirits sector if anyone also does anything similar and can give me specific job market info (what I was doing before I moved away) although I have previously worked in financial accounts management and social media research so open to other opportunities. To be fair, even driving a van for Tesco is going to pay more than I’m earning now.

As always, many thanks in advance.

As ever, there are differences between sectors.
I recruit for relatively high level people in financial services and insurance and there is huge demand for people, and not many looking to move.
Friends in IT and tech say the same.
Not sure beyond that.

Yep – I own a digital agency and the demand for developer jobs is very high with spiralling wages (graduates asking for up to £30,000 with senior developers >£50,000).

@johndoh

I had thought of retraining and getting in to IT / software development as I’ve seen there’s a lot of scope for remote working (my wife and son will be staying behind in Spain so any job that lets me see them more is plus).

I’m presuming that I’d need to go back to uni and do a computer science degree? Or are there fast-track ways of getting into the industry through training schemes or courses?

I’m presuming that I’d need to go back to uni and do a computer science degree? Or are there fast-track ways of getting into the industry through training schemes or courses?

Personally I couldn’t care if an employee had a degree or not (although most of ours do) – we just look for people with the right skills (for us that’s generally PHP, WordPress theme development, CSS / Sass, Javascript / jQuery).

These guys do fast-track courses.

Where I work people are leaving and we are struggling to fill vacancies. Mainly due to crap wages.

@devash
I wouldn’t bother with Uni/Degree if all you want to do is Software Development. As above do a Bootcamp, but additionally build something yourself, anything, you’ll learn a lot doing that and it’s something to show off to potential employers. (I’m a mobile app developer)

I’ve tried and failed to hire a data analyst twice in the last couple of months – the situation is similar across all other recruiting managers that I’ve spoken to in our organisation. We’re a charity so pay is always going to be at the lower end of the market, but it seems particularly tight at the moment.

We recruit in a fairly niche area of education as an outdoor learning and play charity. We’ve never paid highest wages, but terms, conditions and generally being seen as a great place to work means we’ve never had recruitment issues in 30 years.

This year things have really dried up down in England, Winchester being head office. Delivery officers are our biggest challenge, but in the last month we’ve struggled to recruit an administrator too. We just advertised for a London area role and had two applicants – 2 years ago we had over 20.

Scotland however I’ve got multiple people emailing in weekly asking for jobs. Noticeably (and we’ve have this as an underlying issue for years) we’ve a lot of people looking for career and location change. A ‘new life in the country’ seems an agenda.

@johndoh interesting that you should mention there being a buoyant graduate jobs market as this is what Experian said in their economic briefing a few weeks ago.

Some sectors are doing really well and some aren’t, it’s quite polarised, a bit like the economy as a whole.

My own experience is in Credit Risk and I went for 2 interview just over a month ago and ended up with job offers from both. Both of them were pay rises and one of them a really decent pay rise.

It obviously depends on your sector, but if my personal experience is anything to go by, you’ll be fending them off with a shitty stick.

I had a call to my work mobile on Friday – it was so-and-so at a competitor’s HR dept wanting to discuss whether or not I wanted to come to work for them. Now over the 16+ years I’ve worked in this job, I’ve been approached by recruiters but never directly by a competitor before.

I get regular (2/3 a week) messages from recruiters via Linkedin and email as well, but that’s less unusual.

This is after being offered a 1/3 pay rise to move to my current job, and I wasn’t badly paid beforehand.

I’m intrigued by software development but I don’t want to derail the OP’s thread. Currently sitting in my office being railroaded into more and more health and safety duties. I’m in a safe, pleasant job with zero stress but not much to do but I’m permanently skint. Plus I miss the chaos and excitement of self employment and I wish I had more flexibility.

Boot camps above look good. Any other reading material for a total beginner? Got nothing else to do in the office today other than read.

@Mackem That’s great to know, thanks. The thing that put me off software development was the presumption that you needed an IT degree to land a job.

@johndoh That bootcamp looks great, especially if they offer the course in Leeds or Manchester (home territory for me, lived and worked in Leeds for 5 years, then Skipton for 4 before we moved to Spain). I’ll take a closer look this week.

graduates asking for up to £30,000 with senior developers >£50,000

Not surprised the market is buoyant with companies offering wages like this for jobs that are allegedly hard to recruit for. Back in 2015 I offered £38,000 as a starting salary for life science graduates and that was considered normal.

Very few organisations have come to terms with the idea of a seller’s market in recruitment and retention.

As folks have said, it really differs by occupation. I’m struggling to recruit for folks to join my team in Pharma R&D consulting. There are not many with the experience, for example 2 years of postdoctoral or industry experience for folks joining us in an associate director role. Location: anywhere. Rewards: fair.

If you’re a consultant old age psychiatrist, there are plenty of posts to choose from. Just no competition on pay and conditions. Same for many NHS roles.

From what I can tell in my area (Cotswolds) theres a surplus of low skill / low wage possition’s available, but not many higher skill / wage. Lots of hospitality possition’s available.

I used to be a retail designer and project manager. Pre Covid I’d get around an email or call a week from agencys looking to fill possition’s – not had one this year….

The thing that put me off software development was the presumption that you needed an IT degree to land a job

Unsure exactly what subjects count as an ‘IT degree’, but coding boot camps are a handy way to get skills and some experience. Many SAS programmers I worked with back in the day had done a life science, maths, or computer science degree and then did a SAS course with a Skipton-based company whose name escapes me. many proved competent at work from day one.

@prettygreenparrot Was that company Base 3 Systems by any chance? We used to live in Skipton so know the name.

I’d be a bit wary about spending money to retrain into software development – no doubt it can be a good career but there’s a very steep learning curve and IME you need to have a bit of a natural aptitude for it (to progress quickly). Also a lot of dev roles aren’t particularly interesting (e.g. making changes to legacy application code) but then I guess not many jobs are actually interesting :p

@FuzzyWuzzy – Agreed. I’d definitely want to do a few free courses first to see if I actually enjoyed the role first before committing cash to retraining for a new career.

Where did my career in life science go wrong? Never seen these roles with a £38K starting salary. Always found life sciences had a massive oversupply of graduates and hence low salarys. Plenty of adverts around here for life science graduates at sub £25K.

We’ve got a couple fo job vacancies open at the moment and are struggling to find anyone – i know a number of other employers in our sector (mechanical Engineering – Defence sector) who are in the same position.
Decent Engineering Graduates are demanding £40k+ straight out of Uni these days.

My recent experience is that employers are being extremely picky and then complaining that they can’t recruit. In my place some managers are happy to recruit and get the help and others seem to love the drama of having to do it all themselves. There seems to be intense competition in London for anything over £40K unless you happen to be in certain areas of IT / software etc

Decent Engineering Graduates are demanding £40k+ straight out of Uni these days.

Jings! Talk about a wake up call. I’m a 10 year experienced engineer and think I need to update my CV – if that’s what graduates are after I must be really behind the curve!

Yep digital is going through another boom at the moment, I’ve just moved jobs for a decent bump in salary (and pension). I was bored where I was anyway, so was a good time to move. Plus there are LOTS of roles for javascript developers right now.

graduates asking for up to £30,000 with senior developers >£50,000

£50k is not really a spiralling salary for a senior developer.

The thing that put me off software development was the presumption that you needed an IT degree to land a job

You certainly don’t need an IT degree to get into software development. But what you do need is a appetite to constantly want to learn new things (mostly in your own time) – I’ve interviewed plenty of graduates, but I’d always look for those with a passion for development over those who have a piece of paper.

EDIT:

I wouldn’t bother with Uni/Degree if all you want to do is Software Development. As above do a Bootcamp, but additionally build something yourself, anything, you’ll learn a lot doing that and it’s something to show off to potential employers.

This. Also, see if you can find yourself a mentor for whatever side of software development you choose to pursue. It will help massively – from things like code reviews, pair programming etc.

@devash Do you know what type of Development you want to do? Webisites / Mobile / Backend / some other thing?

From what I can tell in my area (Cotswolds) theres a surplus of low skill / low wage possition’s available, but not many higher skill / wage. Lots of hospitality possition’s available.

Similar feel round here, though a mate in IT said their consultants are seeing big rises.

Stuck in a relatively well paid (by Civil Service) corner of the Civil Service working against people with no better qualifications who are on double the salary, and wondering why we can’t recruit/retain…..

@prettygreenparrot, @freeagent, this is bonkers! ~£40k+ as a fresh graduate? Where are all these jobs?!

@Mackem – I’m specifically interested in front end web development. I have a bit of background / experience in website coding (HTML, flash, Java) from my university degree (Communications), but that was way back in the early 2000s and I know things have changed massively now.

Not quite your area but I work for a major Engineering firm and hire a lot in the Nuclear Engineering sector – we’re seeing a MASSIVE shortfall of engineers/technical/scientists in all disciplines and at all levels. The money being asked now by some is nuts – think 6 figures for a staff role for somebody with 10 years’ experience. But, whilst we are short it’s a buyers market and the work needs doing so we pay it for the right people. The whole nuclear sector (and I think design engineering in general) is short staffed at the moment.

Was that company Base 3 Systems by any chance?

Yes! It was. They seemed really on the ball and provided some excellent folks who had been through their program.

this is bonkers! ~£40k+ as a fresh graduate? Where are all these jobs?

This was, and as far as I know still is the case, in big pharma R&D. Not as many jobs as there could have been in the U.K., but there’s still demand. Graduate posts usually required MSc, 1 class BSc or 2:1 in a relevant subject. Mostly in the south even with the vogue for WFH so there is some hardship involved.

USA salaries for similar posts tend to be higher. And there’s great opportunity for mobility in the USA with ‘will to work’ legislation.

By the way, if you have a maths/computer science background or life sciences and ML or AI skills then it’s a highly competitive market for your talent for now.

@devash – happy to offer help/advice, this is exactly my area. Although now I tend to focus more on javascript full-stack development – which really is where most front-end development roles are currently moving towards.

I’ve got 2 new jobs so far this year, hopefully won’t need to look for another 1, the first was as a result of redundancy the second as a result of not liking the first.

I do have a Comp Science degree though (from a long time ago), although I only work as a Scrum master these days so only really need to understand tech conversation at a high level. It does mean I’m not tied to a technology or industry sector though.

Personally I’d not look to get into development and faffing with things like websites, Devops people are needed everywhere I’ve worked over the last 5 years and there has been a shortage of them for the whole time. It’s also something you could support remotely more easily in my experience.

There’s a growing UK wine scene at the moment, from growers (Saffron Grange, Tillingham, Chapel Down all all new places of different scales), then you have people out and about selling to restaurants, I think most of the places in Cambridge are supplied by 1 or 2 suppliers. But I’d imagine you’d need a way in, or some capital to get into this.

Where you live may be as important as what you chose to do.

It’s also something you could support remotely more easily in my experience.

Not sure this is the case across the board – we use lots of remote resource, and most of our permy devs are mainly remote now. My new role is fully remote, and while looking for roles, most employers were ok with it (bigger talent pool to source from).

Devops is a good option, but I’d say this can be an even steeper learning curve than becoming a developer. AWS, kubernetes/containers, multi-cloud, terraforming, serverless, build/deploy pipelines etc etc – the reason it’s always in demand is it’s not an easy leap to make.

Wow, £40k for a new engineering graduate! I’ve almost 20years experience, and without allowances I’m under that.

To be fair, I’m a civil engineer, with most of my experience working on canals for the operator, so not directly moveable. Also, I like the environment I work in. I’d never go and work for a big consultant again or a contractor. We are recruiting, but it will be interesting to see if we get anything. HS2 is sucking in everything. But you can’t go for a walk around site like you can a canal towpath.

@prettygreenparrot, @freeagent, this is bonkers! ~£40k+ as a fresh graduate? Where are all these jobs?!

Thing is – if you’ve just done 4 years at Uni to get your MEng you’re £50k+ in Debt – so you want to be earning pretty big as its a lot to pay back.

We’re talking top end here – decent grades from respectable Universities – not a 3rd from a crap former Poly.

Personally I’d not look to get into development

Dev demand is solid, but Devops, Data and Infosec are where the real heat is. At a more senior level architects of all kinds are in demand, and CIOs. On the whole you’ll get more money and better prospects working for one of the big consultancies, but you will pay a price for that – although less than pre-pandemic as the rise of remote working means that you will have a much greater chance of seeing your family during the week.

I’m a Design engineer / CAD monkey with a 3rd from a crap former Poly.

Its been an under staffed under valued career since before I started, just looked and there seems to be about a 5k increase in the top end but the bottom end is just the same and I’ve never ever known anyone be offered the top. Would I jump ship for less than 100 extra a week, probably not.

this is bonkers! ~£40k+ as a fresh graduate? Where are all these jobs?!

Only for the top few %.

When I graduated (’92 IIRC) places like British Airways were taking on graduates on £20k for the management training program, thats probably roughly equiv to £40k now.

Yep
Retail, Sussex based.
Struggle to fill sales assistant positions ay £9.62 an hour.
If you have a reasonable standard of secondary education and are willing to work evenings and weekends there are supervisor roles that are salaried that start with a 2….