There are lots of jobs for technologists in nearshore locations like Belfast, but it's not a great career move
If you're a City-based financial technologist who has fallen on hard times and are considering hopping on a plane to Ireland for one of the many nearshored IT roles in Dublin or Belfast, you may wish to reconsider.
While London's IT in finance job market is showing signs of strain, recruiters in Dublin and Belfast are struggling to attract enough people to fill the vacancies.
Andrew Crawford, head of IT recruiters Experis Ireland, says: "There's not enough talent locally to fill these roles and we’re casting the net ever wider. We'd like to attract people from the UK and Europe, but increasingly it's necessary to look to Australia and New Zealand, particularly as that's where a large proportion of Irish emigrants are."
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is set to unveil a significant IT recruitment drive in Belfast, Citigroup is also hiring there, according to recruiters, along with tech vendors Fidessa and First Derivatives.
The first stumbling block is pay. Crawford suggests that, on average, you should expect to earn around 40% less in Ireland than London, assuming you've received a decent bonus (unlikely currently, admittedly).
In Belfast, for instance, project managers should expect around £55k, suggest sources, while development salaries usually come in at around £40-50k. These figures aren't bad for technology roles generally, but those in the City – where such roles pay £80-90k and £70-80k depending on product area, respectively – they're relatively derisory.
The way to circumvent a drop in salary is to engineer an internal transfer to Belfast or Dublin. If you're company wants you to go, they have to be willing to pay, after all. However, this may not be such a great long-term career move.
"Ultimately, the aim of these nearshore centres is to save money, so firms will eventually look to train and develop those from the local markets to displace expensive City recruits," says one senior technologist in Belfast.
Even so, graduate roles within investment banks' nearshore centres have remained challenging to fill. Citi was still recruiting grads for Belfast and Dublin until recently, Bank of America also still had vacancies for its global technology and operations programme in Dublin in February. Meanwhile, J. P Morgan has a late February deadline for its EMEA technology graduate programme in Bournemouth as did Morgan Stanley for its wealth management tech centre in Glasgow.
There's also the fact that, with more companies entering the Belfast and Dublin, poaching between firms is becoming more commonplace.
"It's become a more competitive market over the last three or four years," says Fearghal McGovern, business development manager at First Derivatives. "It's still a challenge to find good people, and we are always conscious of keeping hold of our existing staff."
