Digital Technology Employment

South West Skills, Talent Retention and Engagement.

The Bristol region hosts more than 10,000 technology companies and an internationally renowned and mature tech ecosystem. Tech growth is being driven by emerging clusters in AI, robotics, fintech, VR, HealthTech, GreenTech and creative tech projects, which are springing out of the city’s many incubators and university research projects. Scale-ups have access to a wide variety of growth capital sources in the South West including angel groups and venture capital trusts. The region’s start-up and creative scene is well documented as one of the most progressive, innovative and exciting in
the world.

Bristol’s talent market continues to flourish thanks to the concentration of high-quality education establishments, an ever-growing intake of relocators seeking a better quality of life and a vast number of tech meetup communities. With the move towards greater remote working, the pool of talent is deepening and the area benefits from a vast contractor network. Local developer academies and initiatives that bring cross-trainers and juniors through are gathering pace to support demand.

Skill sets in demand

Based on our data, these are the skills that are in highest demand in the South West among Tech talent within Development/DevOps teams:

NodeJS / ExpressJS / TypeScript / MicroservicesFront-End JavaScript (React, React Native, Angular, Vue & more)
Front-End JavaScript (React, React Native, Angular, Vue & more)
PHP / Open Source (Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, Magento, WordPress)
C# .Net (.Net Core, MVC, Umbraco, Sitecore, Blazor)
Senior Technologists / Leaders (Head of Dev, CTO, Dev Manager, Tech Leads)
Python for Web (Django, Flask, Jinja, APIs)
Automated Testing (Selenium, SpecFlow, Gherkin, Cucumber, Ruby, C#)
DevOps (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud,
Azure & more)
Java (Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate & more)
Functional Programming (Elixir, Rust, Scala, Clojure etc.)
Ruby / Ruby-on-Rails
Mobile (React Native, Kotlin, Swift)

Retention and engagement

Based on our internal data, the 10 most important factors in retaining Tech talent within Tech teams are:

Remote working (100% Remote or a Hybrid Model are
general preferences)
Flexible working (Minimal core hours, flexible start/finish times, allowance for childcare/personal situations)
Tech autonomy & progression (Non-micro management, regular R&D days, training budgets, career development meetings & implementation of new tech)
Competitive salary (Regular appraisals & salary reviews to keep up with constant changes in the industry)
Focus on diversity & inclusion (With dedicated ambassadors & initiatives)
Work/life balance autonomy (Uncapped holiday, 4-day weeks & 9-day fortnights)
Environment and Tools (Welcoming office space, high-quality tech equipment, regular upgrades. Broadband / Utilities payments to support those working from home)
Regular socials and team outings (Inclusive for drinkers, non-drinkers)
Annual bonus & share/equity schemes
Pension beyond the minimum (Healthy pension schemes are becoming more important)