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Monster: Job market still shrinking for IT pros

Tom Espiner ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 10 Feb 2009 17:22 GMT

The number of new technology jobs advertised in the UK has continued to decline, according to a survey by Monster.com.

Taking the frequency of jobs advertised to indicate the health of the employment market, the prognosis is not good. According to Monster's January 2009 UK Employment Index, released on Tuesday, the IT job market has shrunk about 36 percent year-on-year. The online recruitment company regularly collects and collates information from employment websites, including its own, to formulate the index.

"The job market is an obvious casualty of the deepening recession," Hugo Sellert, head of economic research at Monster Worldwide, said in a statement on the overall survey findings. "Online advertised vacancies reached a two-and-a-half-year low in January."

The whole UK jobs market has been affected by the recession, and positions are increasingly hard to find, according to Monster. The company found that the employment index for all sectors has fallen by 31 percent in one year.

However, not all recruitment websites experienced a downturn in jobs across the board. Alex Farrell, managing director of UK IT recruitment website IT Job Board, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that although the number of IT jobs being advertised on the site decreased last year, the number of corporate clients advertising actually increased by 3.5 percent.

"It's a small increase, but an increase nonetheless," said Farrell. "We see this as a shift from advertisers using recruitment agencies to advertising directly. It's a more cost-effective method."