A National Computing Centre report warns employers to budget for increased training of existing staff to cope with the skills shortage

The UK's IT sector is suffering its worst shortage of skills for a decade, according to new figures.

Perceived shortages in the industry jumped from 4.2 percent last year to 6.8 percent this year, a national survey of IT salaries and employment trends has found.

Just under 40 percent of respondents indicated recruitment and retention issues, a significant increase on the 29 percent reported last year.

The report warns employers to budget for increased training, with 73 percent of those who said there was a need for new skills planning to get hold of them by retraining existing staff.

The report predicts that those workers with business-analysis, network-support, .Net Oracle, SAP, VMware, web-development and project-management skills will be in high demand over the next two years.

Salary growth in the sector remains stable, with respondents reporting an average wage increase of 3.7 percent.

The number of performance-related bonuses is also on the increase, up from six to 44 percent, with the value of those bonuses rising from 7.5 percent to 8.3 percent.

The annual poll of 244 organisations, which provides salary and employment details for 5,493 IT staff, was undertaken by the National Computing Centre.

Copyright © 1995-2008 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CNET Networks, Inc. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CNET Networks, Inc.