Nature of employment

Occupation

BAME representation amongst IT specialists in 2022 ranged from just 13% of IT Engineers and IT Directors – to 25% of Programmers/ Developers.

BAME representation by IT occupation (2022)

Source: Analysis of ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey by BCS
* Five-year average

Permanency of employment

Overall, 3% of IT specialists in the UK were working on a non-permanent basis in 2022, whilst for IT specialists from BAME ethnic groups the figure was slightly higher at 4%. By comparison, the proportion of BAME workers as a whole in non-permanent employment during the year was still higher at 11%.

Though a detailed analysis of the reasons why IT specialists (white/BAME) were in non-permanent employment during 2022 is not possible due to limitations of the data source, it can be said that a substantial proportion of BAME IT specialists, and other BAME workers were in temporary positions as they cannot not find a full-time job – 22% in each case stating this to be the case during the 2018-22 period compared to a full quarter (25%) of workers as a whole in non-permanent positions.

Ethnicity and unemployment

There were approximately 5,000 unemployed IT specialists from ethnic minority groups in the UK during 2022 - 15% of all unemployed IT specialists in the UK at that time.

At 1.2% the associated unemployment rate^[1] for IT specialists from BAME groups was lower than that of their white counterparts (1.7%) though well below the overall unemployment rate for the BAME workforce of the UK (7.0%).

^[1]See data notes.