Construction and IT shrug off pandemic pressure on wages

Office support, banking and aviation leasing salaries fell in 2020 but construction, property, IT and legal salaries avoided a Covid hit – or even gained ground.

new salary survey by Azon Recruitment found that earnings for property, construction and IT workers went up as much as 5pc in 2020.

By contrast, office support salaries fell by as much as 12pc and industries such as banking saw temporary salary cuts of 10pc – with other staff in the most troubled industries sometimes faring much worse.

“2020 was a year that accelerated underlying trends,” Stephen Hoban, director at Azon Recruitment Group said.

“Over 80pc of our client base moved to working from home, there was increased virtualisation of business infrastructure in the cloud. Our clients have a renewed focus on securing the top talent to capitalise on the post-Covid bounce that will come.”

“At the start of 2020 we would have forecasted 6pc salary growth across the board. On average, salary levels remained static. Bonuses took the greatest hit for employee remuneration.”

Hoban predicted that during 2021 there would be salary rises, with resilient areas with critical key skills shortages – such as technology, pharma, life sciences and construction – seeing modest salary rises. Other areas such as banking, aircraft leasing and commercial retail will see a slower return to pre-Covid norms.

“The pillar banks have been impacted greatly through the pandemic and announced voluntary redundancies. Covid also greatly impacted hiring in the growing alternative lending sector and fintech lending space, as firms struggled to lend on their own balance sheet, and the intermediaries struggled to put SMES together with investors as they weren’t initially on the Covid-19 government guarantee scheme,” said Hoban.

Office support roles had been hit by outsourcing, with main office lines now increasingly diverted to call centres.

“This has reduced SME’s requirement for office support as there are also rarely any client meetings,” he said.

But there was cause for optimism: “We predict the second six months of 2021 to be particularly busy if the vaccine role out is successful,” he said.

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