Advertised tech salaries have grown for the third year in a row, with PHP developers, java developers and data scientists experiencing the biggest increase.

Demand for specialised technology roles has increased rapidly in the past year with the number of roles advertised increasing by as much as 41%, complemented by rapid increases in advertised salary for these roles, according to the 2019 Reed Technology Salary Guides.

Analysis of more than 10 million jobs posted since 2015 across sectors, found that while the overall number of technology roles advertised increased by 10% since the start of 2018, specialist roles such as data scientist (20%), .NET developer (13%) and BI developer (13%) showed considerably higher than average increases.

As such, the demand for full stack developers, which can cover many of these disciplines in one role, increased rapidly with a 41% increase in roles advertised since the start of 2018.

This demand also transferred to advertised salary with full stack developers seeing a pay increase of 4.3%, data scientists an increase of 5.9% and .NET developers an increase of 5.9%. This highlights the constant evolution in the industry and demand for niche skill sets.

These results coincide with the Reed Technology State of Skills research which found data scientists are one of the fastest growing roles in the tech sector.

For this role an aptitude for ‘education and training’ was ranked third most important behind ‘complex problem solving’ and ‘deductive reasoning’. This is likely due to the need to explain and inform others about the insight that data reveals.

Andrew Gardner, director of Reed Technology commented, “Looking to 2019 and beyond, there will be a host of development-based roles on the market, as well as service desk analysts.

“There are plenty of roles out there for candidates with mobile experience and front-end development. Alongside that, firms will also need people with cloud-based experience, and storage skills.

“The impact of legislation such as GDPR is creating a lot of demand, with companies making sure they have the right skills, systems and processes in place – as a result roles in data are also growing.”

Since the start of 2015, the increase in roles and salaries advertised has been even more rapid.

The impressive rise of the full stack developer shows the role to have increased in advertised salary by 20.8% and the number of roles advertised to have increased by 848%, demonstrating a particularly great demand from business for these specialists.

Andrew Gardner continued, “Brexit is another factor impacting the number of roles available. Many development roles are currently filled by workers from EU countries, and we don’t know how the industry will react if there are new restrictions enforced on those employees.

“In general, except for in particularly small companies, the days of having an ‘IT guy’ who does a bit of everything are disappearing. Technology is no longer the reserve of one or two members of the team, instead, there is a need for specialist skills.

“Despite the various business upheavals, the good news is that the industry is very robust. It’s not affected too much by seasonal demand, for example.

“More pertinently, whenever any large-scale change occurs, IT is the driving force behind those changes. Even in the depths of the credit crunch, the industry was hit much less than others because firms were using systems to automate things to try and make cost savings – bringing IT and technology to the fore.”