Edinburgh and Glasgow have more than a fifth of workforce in digital tech jobs
Edinburgh’s median digital tech salary is at £44,938 – the second highest outside London.
New data analysed by Tech Nation for the Government’s Digital Economy Council reveals that 69,000 jobs in digital tech were advertised in Edinburgh and Glasgow during 2019, making the tech sector one of the biggest employers. Over a fifth of the workforce of each city is now employed in digital tech.
Scotland’s tech sector has been one of the strongest in the country, outside London and the South East, for several years now. Amazon said last week that it would create hundreds of new roles in Fife and Dundee.
Pre-lockdown, the digital tech sector was advertising over 150,000 jobs a week in the first three months of the year, according to data from jobs website Adzuna. Vacancies fell in line with all other sectors of the economy when the UK’s lockdown began, but have since recovered to stand at 90,297 by the week commencing August 9, 2020. Tech is the UK sector posting the highest number of vacancies, after healthcare.
The figures come from a Bright Tech Future report on jobs and skills in the nation’s tech sector, to be published next month. Analysis from Tech Nation of Adzuna data, cross-referenced with ONS figures, shows the extent to which tech created job vacancies right across the UK in 2019 and into 2020.
Edinburgh and Glasgow are two of nine cities, outside the capital, which now have more than a fifth of the workforce employed in tech. The other cities are Belfast, Cardiff, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol, Reading and Cambridge. Of these, Cambridge and Belfast have the highest penetration of digital tech jobs at nearly 26%. Belfast had the highest proportion of digital tech vacancies in 2019, according to Adzuna.
Over the past two years, jobs across the digital tech sector have increased by 40% and it now employs 2.93 million people. The digital tech workforce now accounts for 9% of the UK’s total workforce. The number of jobs advertised in tech in 2019 outweighed several other sectors, including legal jobs by 7 times; manufacturing by 8 times; and finance and accounting by 2.7 times.
During 2019 more than 113,274 vacancies were advertised in digital tech positions across Scotland. Just under half of these were in Edinburgh and Glasgow. According to Adzuna data, 16.5% of advertised roles in Scotland are now in the tech sector.
The median salary for digital tech roles across the UK in 2019 was £39,000. Average salaries range from £28,500 in the lower quartile to £55,000 in the upper quartile. Edinburgh’ s median salary is £44,938, while Glasgow’s is £40,000 compared with a median salary of £30,000 across all roles.
Edinburgh’s median salary is the highest outside London, where the median digital tech salary in 2019 was £55,000, growing 3% from £53,296 the previous year.
Factoring in the cost of living, cities outside London can have significant attractions for employees. Edinburgh and Glasgow are the third and fourth best value places in the UK for someone working in tech to live and work.
The role of software developer has remained in the top five most sought-after roles across UK cities, alongside key worker roles such as nurses and social care workers. Front-end developers are among the top 10 most-advertised roles in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Vacancies advertised for cloud skills in the UK have grown by 22% since 2018, while AI and cybersecurity grew by 44% and 22% in 2019 year-on-year.
There has also been an increased growth in opportunities for employees with expertise in data ethics, up 31% year-on-year.
