In my professional life I try to make sense of what's going on in the IT industry. There's a lot of data one can use (for example the excellent quarterly e-skills Bulletin and ICT Inquiry), but here's a site from an IT professional doing it himself. Nick Wells runs a website - www.jobstats.co.uk - that analyses the text of published IT job advertisements on the internet and strips out the information about skills, locations and pay rates (though I have to thank my colleague Maggie Cooper for drawing this site to my attention originally).
A key graph from jobstats is below. The effect on IT vacancies of the dot-com boom and bust is clear for this. It also appears that the job market has largely recovered beyond pre-dot-com levels. Of course, this buoyancy begs a question: if the job prospects seem so good, why have applications for computing degrees not recovered in line with the job market?
I've used this a lot when analysing the IT job market. Though it appears rough and ready, you'd be surprised how similar the process behind some 'official' figures can be (measurement of economic factors such as productivity is quite difficult in practice). I doubt that, qualitatively at least, these figures are too far off from the reality.
Anyway, have a look. You may be surprised what you find...
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