IT contracting is being favoured over permanent hiring in the current market but some senior roles are moving back in-house, a recruitment expert says.
Hays IT senior regional director Peter Noblet said permanent roles were steady but contracting was growing in demand.
"We are still seeing that increase in contracting as an option and purely from a project basis and a flexibility point of view," he said.
Mr Noblet said organisations were committed to using outsourced models whether it was with other companies or contracting services.
"However, we are seeing a lot more senior roles being brought back in-house in the strategy and architecture space," he said.
Mr Noblet said companies were keen to keep knowledge in-house and retain their intellectual property.
"We have seen that in major businesses and also SMEs, but more on the medium-side."
Mr Noblet said the application of knowledge around areas such as big data would be important moving forward.
"The technology people that run that type of stuff are going to have to really engage with the likes of marketing departments, sales departments to make sure that that information is being used effectively."
He said "soft" skills such as communication skills, engagement skills, stakeholder management and leadership were more critical than ever.
"Whether it is in the cloud, whether it is use of social media, whether it is use of mobility – there are impacts across the business, not just technology now."
Mr Noblet said there continued to be strong investment in .NET and Microsoft areas of technology, while Java skill sets were also sought after.
"On the development side, we are seeing open source still being used quite heavily and that is from an ability to customise quite quickly," he said.
"We are also seeing quite a lot of demand for business intelligence people and data warehousing so technical skills like Hadoop."
