Henri Egle Sorotos, November 28, 2017 2 min read
I’m very excited…..about job adverts.
In early 2018, Tech North will be delivered millions of rows of job ad data from across the North of England, courtesy of Adzuna. The information will be used to explore, analyse and quantify the demand for digital jobs across the North of England. Crucially, the data will stretch back over a three-year period.
This will mean we can see how the labour market demands have changed over an extended period of time.
Preparing millions of rows of data takes time when it has to be fed through some pretty nifty machine learning processes. In the meantime I’ve been using Adzuna’s rate-limited open API to delve into salary data from across the North West of England to appease those eagerly waiting for the results. I’ve been using the command line tool cURL to access the API.
For this first blog, I’ve interrogated the median average salary for job adverts requiring the following common programming languages:
Figure 1 highlights how the median salary by language fluctuates over the last 12 months compared to the North West median salary. One thing is clear – those with programming skills are likely to be paid far more than those without. For instance, developers with Python skills could command a £48,000 median salary at the end of 2016. This dwarfs the £28,645 median salary for all job adverts in the North West at this time.
Whilst technical digital jobs appear to pay far higher salaries, they are not static over the 12 months examined. Figures 2 and 3 visualise the variance in salaries. In the cases of Python, HTML, CSS, SQL, Javascript and C#, the median salary has actually decreased over this period. This could be due to a number of supply, demand or exogenous reasons.
I will continue to blog about the demand for Northern talent and skills over the coming weeks ahead of the Northern Digital Jobs Dashboard launch. In addition, there are plans for a day-long data hack to allow the community to have a play with the huge dataset. Watch this space!
If you want to get involved with any of the analysis, drop me a line. I’d be happy to discuss.
