Technology SW Talent Snapshot 2023/24

TECH SOUTH WEST OVERVIEW

With a focus on the South West, Bristol in particular offers a compelling environment for growth in the technology sector, driven by a skilled workforce, vibrant start-up culture and a commitment to innovation. As the region continues to evolve, it is expected to play an increasingly pivotal role in shaping the future of the UK’s technology landscape.

Bristol hosts clusters in AI, Robotics, FinTech, VR, HealthTech, GreenTech and Creative tech projects, with many springing out of the city’s incubators and University research projects.

Access to a wide variety of growth capital sources, including angel groups and venture capital trusts means the region’s start-up/scale-up and creative scene is well documented as one of the most progressive, innovative and exciting in the world.

TECH LANDSCAPE

Outside of London, the most flourishing tech cities in the UK are Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds and Cambridge, with disruptive start-ups and scale-ups constantly emerging, despite the economic climate.

We’re seeing an abundance of innovative solutions around climate change, renewable resources and mental/physical well-being. Looking back at how the pandemic affected us all in various ways, we’re still seeing an influx of Tech4Good / GreenTech businesses growing at pace due to the rising demand for purpose in development; Who am I helping? What is my code being used for? Etc. This is still very much the case heading into 2024.

Remote working is still popular and a preferred way of working for many. This means Bristol, Manchester etc can tap into other regions that have been historically out of reach, but the flipside to this benefit is they’ll often be competing with London salaries, which can have an impact on the ability to secure local talent.

We always say, if you have the support structure in place, invest in Graduate or Junior talent, upskill from within and support their future progression. We’ve seen many businesses find success in nurturing fledgling techies.

SKILLS IN DEMAND

In our previous Snapshot we spoke of a driving interest across AR / VR / XR, Automation, Haptic/Touchless Tech and AI/ML in the local region. Well, it continues, even more so now, especially in AI.

DevOps is as huge as ever, becoming more and more common place within smaller software houses and SME’s over 2023. We’ve seen a rise in the use of tools like Grafana for data visualization and monitoring that links with data sources like Prometheus (used to collect and store metrics), Elasticsearch (a search engine based on the Lucine library) and InfluxDB (used for storage and retrieval of time series data), as well as Gradle. Gradle is a very flexible open-source build automation tool. Docker and Kubernetes are still the most used containerization tools from what we see.

We think it’s fair to say we never see a drop in demand for modern JavaScript libraries, particularly React & Node.

Solid PHP Developers are still in demand, as long as it’s OOP. Laravel MVC is popular (often paired with Vue on the frontend) and we see the need for Symfony here and there too for the bigger builds (often paired with React).

React Native and Flutter have been battling it out for the Mobile App Development crown since around 2017. There are more React Native developers on the market, so perhaps it’s time to pick up Flutter, as Flutter Dev’s are definitely rarer and harder to find.

Experience using Cypress and Playwright are in big demand when it comes to QA/Test Automation.

Being open-minded to being in the office again!! With a rise in more consultative and service-driven business propositions, there’s an increasing need for well-rounded technical capability with strong client-facing, stakeholder management and leadership/mentoring skills. We find a lot of companies feel they operate at a higher level when working collaboratively in the office.