Which engineering IT jobs are most affected by the pandemic?

E&T'sdata analysis across hundreds of job titles listed on the UK job analytics portal ITjobswatch suggests that many might be struggling under the current Covid-19 conditions.

Several IT engineering job types have fallen in the portal's rankings. ITjobswatchsays ‘rank’ refers to the relative position of a job role or skill in terms of the number of matching unique IT job vacancies seen over a 6- or 3-month period, and is a simple measure of popularity with 1 indicating the most popular.

Especially, opportunities among Linux software engineers -Linux isa family of open-source Unix-like operating systems - faced difficulties over the course of the past six months, according to the data.

While the pandemic affected the number of job vacancies in the sector, salary expectations stayed relatively solid rate. Across the IT sector, the median annual salary increased, from £52,500 in 2019 to £55,000 in 2020, according to ITjobswatch data.

The average median salary for engineering IT jobs is calculated at £51,979. There are jobs with open vacancies, such as for an Elasticsearch engineer, that can pay £150,000 per annum.

In the largest IT engineering category, software engineering jobs, the number of vacancies fell sharply compared with previous periods in 2018 and 2019.

London dominates in the number of software engineering job vacancies posted. The city accounted for 34 per cent of jobs in England. Other strong regions in this regard are the South East and the North of England.

Companies also look actively for people who can work from home. More than 200 live vacancies were found in this regard.

The demand for engineering-sector jobs is high at present. When UK component manufacturing company Lontra advertised for new employees it received an overwhelming response of 15,000 applications for only ten jobs on its new Birmingham assembly line.