The first quarter of 2010 may have been a high watermark in the investment banking IT recruitment market which is unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future, according to research by City recruitment firm McGregor Boyall.
"Comparisons between the first quarter of 2010 and 2011 appear to confirm the market view that vacancies are down by an average of just over 17%," says managing director Laurie Boyall. "But this masks other underlying trends - permanent vacancies are actually down 26.6% year on year while contract requirements have only fallen by just over 5%."
The most in demand skills for the first quarter of 2011 have been developers (37% of vacancies) - of those 42% were for Java specialists, 36% for those with C# experience. Business, systems and technical analysis expertise was next in line with just over a fifth (21%) of vacancies in this area.
Much of the underlying momentum in City IT recruitment appears to be driven by the rising tide of regulation, with risk, operations and derivatives desks the most active recruiters.
Says Boyall: "We believe that there may be an increasing trend towards pure technologists moving away from London - or even the UK - whereas change specialists and business analysts as well as compliance and risk professionals, will remain close to their revenue generating colleagues. This is reflected in our own business where over a third of our revenue is now derived from non IT recruitment, a proportion that is continuing to grow."