Why Working in Tech Has Never Been Better

Every few months Work in Startups do an in-depth analysis to check out what the latest hiring news is amongst the top UK tech companies. In September 2021, we revelaed that they are continuing to hire at record rates post-pandemic, with a 128% increase in jobs on offer since September 2020. These companies are currently […]

Why Working in Tech Has Never Been Better

The switch to online services that accelerated during the pandemic has been fueling the industry, creating an abundance of opportunities right across the UK. The Office of National Statistics reported almost 20,000 new tech companies had registered on Companies House during the pandemic, so the record growth in tech jobs comes at no surprise.

Which tech companies are hiring?

The UK Foodtech scene remains very well-positioned and has continued to show the largest growth in hiring. The pandemic has notably accelerated the online food delivery business, with London creating a strong foundation as a global hub for FoodTech innovation. Foodtech giants, Deliveroo (239 vacancies), Gousto (117 vacancies) and Hellofresh (41 vacancies), continue to flourish post-pandemic with huge increases in their number of vacancies compared to this time last year.

Citypantry, the UK corporate catering marketplace who were acquired by Just Eat in 2019, has seen the largest growth in number of vacancies (75 vacancies), indicating employees returning to the office and is now in full swing.

Amazon remains the highest advertiser (1,571 vacancies) amongst the top UK tech firms with their number of jobs doubling from last September.

Deliveroo is notable for a further reason, which it shares with FTSE 250 cyber security AI business Darktrace: both were among the thirty tech and consumer internet companies to list their shares on the London Stock Exchange so far this year and both raised money when doing so. They therefore have enhanced funds to drive expansion, including by recruitment. Darktrace is actively recruiting across all roles, with over 70 vacancies in the UK and over 250 globally. The growing popularity of the tech IPO has demonstrated the vital link between strength in stock markets and the real economy.

What tech jobs are in demand and where are they?

Tech vacancies have been analysed by the most popular searched job titles within the industry to indicate where the demand is. With online presence being more important than ever, it’s no surprise that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has seen the largest year-on-year growth, at 274% and a creation of 6,997 jobs.

Programming and Developer jobs continue to lead the way with 74,000 vacancies currently on the market. This growth has continued right through the pandemic and isn’t showing signs of slowing.

London and South West England remain to be the strongest regions with the number of tech jobs available however, Eastern England and the West Midlands have seen a similar growth (130%) since September last year, with an additional 10,000 jobs on the market between them.

In March 2021, we celebrated the milestone of hitting 1 million vacant jobs in the UK after seeing a real low last May, with just 350,700 on the market. There are now over 1.2 million jobs on the market with tech jobs making up 13% (150,000) of the total UK vacancies according to Adzuna data. Comparing this to May 2020, that is a 348% increase.

Table 1: Vacancies & Growth rate by Job type

Job Type	September 2021 vacancies	YoY % Change
SQL	31,695	146.69%
Product Manager	26,405	114.14%
Digital Marketing	17,900	127.27%
Java	16,251	124.18%
IT Support	14,813	174.62%
Web Developer	8,585	77.56%
Data Scientist	10,408	151.52%
PHP	6,907	106.30%
SEO	9,545	274.61%
Front End Developer	5,348	121.54%
Social Media Manager	4,071	133.43%
Web Designer	3,243	128.38%
Ruby	2,832	117.51%
CTO	2,381	113.93%
IT Sales	3,433	208.72%
Perl	1,212	67.17%
DBA	991	87.33%

Table 2: Tech Job Vacancies, Growth rate and Average Salary by Region

Region	September 2021 tech vacancies	YoY% change	Average advertised salary
UK wide*	147,671	142%	£60,315
London	49,145	141%	£75,085
South East England	25,298	153%	£59,722
North West England	11,588	105%	£49,430
South West England	9,843	76%	£50,222
Eastern England	8,797	135%	£49,450
West Midlands	8,943	132%	£50,222
Yorkshire And The Humber	5,389	105%	£47,411
Scotland	6,299	114%	£51,827
East Midlands	4,361	94%	£59,722
Wales	2,238	97%	£42,212
North East England	2386	114%	£43,154
Northern Ireland	1831	70%	£45,969

Vicky Vitkay, general manager at Work in Startup comments: It’s exciting to see UK tech unicorns and startups continuing to thrive. We can certainly celebrate the UK being the global capital of innovation, however efforts and focus need to go into ensuring diversity and inclusion are fulfilled within this huge ecosystem and importantly, we need to be providing more entry level job opportunities for graduates who are entering the market.

For further data, please contact vicky@workinstartups.com

A Quick Response

QR-ious about the rise of QR (Quick Response) codes? These little boxes of matrix barcodes have been around for 20 years but haven’t really taken off until the pandemic struck us. They’ve been incredibly useful in preventing virus contraction and obviously, made it super convenient to order pints at the pub. In fact, QR code […]

A Quick Response

QR-ious about the rise of QR (Quick Response) codes? These little boxes of matrix barcodes have been around for 20 years but haven’t really taken off until the pandemic struck us.

They’ve been incredibly useful in preventing virus contraction and obviously, made it super convenient to order pints at the pub. In fact, QR code downloads have soared 750% over the last 18 months, according to Bitly.

The pandemic widened the gap in the market and we’ve seen many QR startups be born out of the pandemic. According to Traxcn, there are over 100 QR code companies now.

Flowcode (who have recently worked with JLo) has been revolutionising the consumer marketing industry by building a connection between online and offline. Imagine seeing an advert for a brand you like on the Central line. A QR code could allow you to scan the barcode and be taken straight to the product, genius! While that sounds pretty cool, they don’t appear to have reached the London Underground yet (prioritise some air conditioning on the Central first please).

QR code startups don’t yo-yo around either, except Yoyo Wallet that is. A London based start-up, Yoyo Wallet concerns itself with payment and customer rewards. This start-up gives us the taste for the future of hybrid physical-digital shopping interactions.

Yet, with great QR codes comes great responsibilities. As positive as the rapid growth has been for this niche industry, potential questions might be raised on its impact on the occupation of service staff or security.

To end on a lighter note, instead of picking the red or blue pill, pick a QR code! Have a scan of the QR codes below.

Weekly brief: The online dating apps shaking traditions.

Online dating is already a bit of a minefield. Throw a global pandemic into the equation, dating in 2021 isn’t easy. But there’s no doubt that dating apps have thrived in the past couple of years, as result. This trend isn’t likely to slow down just because COVID is coming to an end. Recognising this, […]

Weekly brief: The online dating apps shaking traditions.

This trend isn’t likely to slow down just because COVID is coming to an end. Recognising this, we look at the newcomers entering the dating scene.

Thursday, the dating app backed by Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, is a unique concept whereby you match, flirt and chat during the day on a Thursday before locking in a date evening. Raising an impressive £2.5m in funding, they’re on track to overtake the big players dominating the dating scene.

Using real time geolocation technology, Happn will match you with people who are also on the app in close proximity on a daily basis. With a 100M worldwide users and a total of £16M raised in funding, their personal take on dating sets them apart from their competitors.

So Syncd, the dating app that matches compatible personality types, has raised a seed round of almost £1m to grow its user base. Founded by 2 sisters in Cornwall, they’ve used a unique algorithm, based on the Myers-Briggs personality test to bring people together.

The online dating market value is expected to reach £74 million this year so whether we like it or not, these platforms are here to stay, pandemic or no pandemic.

Weekly brief: Scotland’s startup scene continues to surge!

2,500 startups and with £345million collectively raised in funding, Scotland is steadily making moves within the UK startup space. Scotland is just getting started with consistent growth being delivered every year. So who is worth keeping an eye on? With Scotland being the base for some of the UKs most successful “unicorn”companies, Sky Scanner and […]

Weekly brief: Scotland’s startup scene continues to surge!

With Scotland being the base for some of the UKs most successful “unicorn”companies, Sky Scanner and Brewdog to name a few, it’s no surprise that a generation of fast growing tech businesses are following suit.

Amphista Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company is developing pioneering innovations creating therapeutics that harness the body’s natural processes to remove disease-causing proteins. They’ve recently announced the closing of an impressive £38 million Series B financing round.

Roslin Technologies in Edinburgh are on a mission to make the agriculture and animal health sectors more sustainable. A unique joint venture between the University of Edinburgh and two investment and business development partners with global networks aids the company’s success.

NuCana BioMed, develops and commercialises rationally designed medicines for significant unmet medical needs in the biopharmaceutical sector. Since launching, they have raised a staggering £120 million with just 5 key investors.

These 3 ‘futurecorns’ are responsible for the employment of 500 people alone.

E Fundamentals, a SaaS platform based in Edinburgh,who have recently announced plans to create 12 tech jobs to fuel its global expansion all in effort to support the city’s mission to be a centre for tech excellence, provides businesses with brand insights and offers advice on how to increase their revenue and traffic. Impressive clients include a recent partnership with Pepsico to power their eCommerce growth in Europe.

UK start-ups raised £1.3 billion in the whole of 2010. They raised the same amount in the first three weeks of 2021.With continued policy innovation, research investment, and the right talent, the UK is on track to become the heart of the European tech ecosystem.

What is a ‘startup’?

Here at Work in Startups, we are often asked what types of companies we classify as a startup (and similarly, what it takes to make it onto our site!) In the interest of transparency, we thought we’d expand on how we think a “startup” differs from other labels commonly tossed around, such as “scaleup”, “SME”, […]

What is a ‘startup’?

Full Disclosure: it is highly subjective! There is no single, universally accepted definition of a startup. It’s a much more broad-reaching term than others you might hear such as ‘unicorn’ (a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion). Confusion is possibly rooted in the rise of companies keen to define themselves as a startup (it’s a sexy tag after all), even when they don’t fulfil many of the characteristics that others would deem essential.

What are the features of a startup

In our humble opinion, these tend to be the two key features that differentiate a startup from any old company:

Growth – is it expanding and growing rapidly, in terms of either customers, new jobs or financials? Yes? Potentially this company is a startup! There’s a relatively widely shared blog post on this which goes into much more detail on why this angle is often considered the most important: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Innovative – the startup industry has become culturally synonymous with the concept of disruptive business models. For us, a startup needs to offer something fresh!

Often but not always: a tech focus or component, VC funding (or likely potential to receive/qualify for funding in the near future), some element of risk (not a traditional service with hundreds of comparables), interesting employee perks and an “owner culture” (which could mean equity awards readily available to staff).

Meanwhile, these features can help the eagle-eyed spot where a company is on its journey to unicorn status (i.e. when is it likely no longer a startup):

New – the exact age before a company falls into ‘scaleup territory’ is up for debate: some experts set as low as three-years-old as this cap. We modestly say about five-years-old, absolute maximum ten.
Small – headcount (like age) is a nice marker for when a company has graduated to ‘scale-up status.’ We think this happens when you exceed roughly 100-200 members of staff.
Revenue – as with all of the numbers in this list, a revenue of more than £10 million is a rough metric, to give you a general feel. Effectively: no unicorns allowed!

At Work in Startups, we think that growth (or growth potential) is the most important identifier for startups. While our opinion is based on rather a lot of startup companies and job ads, we wanted to see what our lovely and knowledgeable twitter community thought. Interestingly they had other ideas…

As you can see the results overwhelmingly favoured how recently the company was founded – although it is clear that growth is quite important! This really suggests that checking a variety of metrics (cue our handy-dandy list) is the only way for us to truly hunt the next unicorn!

Note: we include a combination of start up and scale up jobs on our site, as despite the terminology being murky, we tend to find our audience is broadly interested in both. Do feel free to get in touch though if you have any comments on this!

What are the features of a startup

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