Contractor demand was sustained across all but one of the core contracting disciplines during December 2012, displaying a solid performance and peaking at just below November’s 20-month high.
The latest Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC)/KPMG Report on Jobs shows both billings and vacancies increasing, suggesting client demand is being met by the contractors available.
REC chief executive Kevin Green was upbeat about the results: “We’ve now had…five consecutive months of growth in temporary job placements. It’s another milestone for the UK labour market, which hasn’t seen a full quarter of simultaneous increases in both temp and permanent job placements since mid-2011.
“It’s also further confirmation of the continued strength of our flexible labour market in keeping people in employment,” adds Green.
Engineering and construction and IT and computing were third and fifth respectively in the demand league table. Accounting and financial, which includes the beleaguered financial sector, crept up a place from November and spent the second month in positive territory.
The only core contracting sector to see a fall in demand during December was executive/professional, which saw little or no growth throughout 2012.
Recruiters highlighted that engineers generally, and building services engineers in particular, were in short supply during December, alongside IT contractor developers. And according to Green, skills shortages are likely to worsen as 2013 progresses.
“The developing story this year is likely to be one of skills shortages as people with expertise in key areas become harder and harder to source,” he explains. “We are already seeing this in areas like IT and engineering.”
Contractor vacancies in the public sector have been growing since October 2012, and experienced a surge in December. So, the off-payroll rules introduced in September 2012 do not appear to have deterred contractors from public sector contracts.
“The picture for 2013 is likely to be similar to 2012, and we expect the labour market to yet again outperform the sluggish economic growth in the UK,” says Green. “Employers are confident in their own businesses, if not the economy as a whole, and know they have to retain or recruit talent in order to have a competitive advantage.”