Nature of employment

Occupation

Representation of older workers amongst the IT professions varies substantially and during 2023, whilst only around one in seven programmers/software developers and web designers/developers were aged 50+, four in ten of those working as IT directors (39%) were from this age bracket.

Indeed - in general, it would appear that older workers are more poorly represented amongst IT development (web/other) roles and best represented amongst senior/managerial and technical positions.

Representation by IT occupation (2023)

Source: Analysis of ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey by BCS

Permanency of employment

At 2%, the proportion of IT specialists aged 50 and above that were working on a non-permanent basis during 2023 was marginally below that of younger IT specialists (3%), and individuals as a whole aged 50+ (3%).

By comparison, the incidence of non-permanent employment amongst all workers during 2023, was much higher at 6%.

Though a detailed analysis of the reasons why IT specialists (older/otherwise) were in non-permanent employment in 2023 is not possible (due to limitations of the data source), it can be said that older IT specialists appear more likely to be in temporary positions as they do not want a permanent job (38% of those aged 50 or above stating this to be the case over the 2019-23 period compared with 22% of those aged 16-49). This was also the case for workers of this age as a whole (with comparison figures of 35% and 23% respectively).

Age and unemployment

There were approximately 13,000 unemployed IT specialists aged 50 and above in the UK during 2023 – 34% of all unemployed IT specialists in the UK at that time.

At 2.9% the associated unemployment rate for older IT specialists was notably higher than that of younger IT workers (1.6% for those aged under 50) and marginally above that for older workers as a whole (2.7%).

^[1]See data notes.