CompTIA’s UK Tech Industry and Workforce Trends provides an in-depth look at employment, economic impact, technology trends, salaries, hiring activity and more across the regions and metropolitan areas of the United Kingdom. The report draws upon a number of data sources including EMSI, Burning Glass Technologies Labour Insights, UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), Eurostat, OECD, CompTIA and more.

Net tech employment in the United Kingdom reached an estimated 2,451,246 workers in 2020, approximately a 2% increase over the previous year. For 2021, the aggregate of tech occupation and tech industry employment will add a projected 37,004 net new workers. See full report PDF for details.

The top four metropolitan areas employ a little more than 725,000 tech industry and tech occupation workers, or about 1 in 3 tech workers in the nation. At approximately 10%, London and Edinburgh have the highest concentration of net tech employment as a percentage of the overall employment base. Compared to the national tech employment concentration benchmark of 7.6%, 5 metro areas had a higher rate, confirming the importance of technology to a far-reaching set of cities across the UK.

The tech industry side of the equation experienced estimated growth of +2.2% year over year. All primary industry categories have seen job gains over a period of the past 5 years. The largest contributors to employment gains are the IT Consultancy and Services category (+80,687) and the Engineering, Testing and Technical Consultancy category (+69,787).

Employer job posting data provides another layer of insight into the tech job market outlook. Overall quarterly tech job postings among U.K. employers dipped during 2020 due to the pandemic slowdown. Postings rebounded in Q1 2021 with employers playing catch-up to meet pent-up demand.

Employer demand for tech talent as measured by online job postings follows a similar pattern to tech employment with London having approximately 36,049 postings in 2020. In second place is Manchester with approximately 29,958 postings. Bristol and Birmingham are third and fourth respectively in terms of tech job postings.

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