A study by KPMG, provider of professional services such as audit, tax and advisory, has found that the UK tech sector’s output growth is the fastest since May 2010. It also found that the employment growth within the UK tech industry is much stronger than the UK-wide trend.
KPMG commissioned Markit Economics, a provider of business surveys, to collect financial data for the UK technology industry to provide an in-depth look at the sector’s employment and output patterns.
The report shows that since the financial crisis in 2008/09, the UK tech industry output has rebounded strongly. The graph below shows the major dip in the sector’s output around the time of the economic crisis, but it began to rise throughout 2009, before reaching its peak in 2010 and remaining almost constant over the next three years.
The increase in UK tech’s business activity has resulted in a growth of job creation since 2009. The graph below shows that the UK tech sector employment rate did not fall as low as the national average. During the worst point of the recession, the UK tech industry saw a lower hit in employment than the UK private sector as a whole, and it started to see an employment recover before other sectors in 2010.
The report found that larger tech firms have driven job creation around 2010 whilst SMEs chose to remain cautious and held on to staff for longer. However, the employment data collected for 2013 shows that both bigger tech companies and SMEs are gradually creating more jobs.
