Even at a time of rising unemployment, Power i pros with sharp enough skills can find new jobs, says a midrange recruitment specialist.

While the recession means that he is seeing less demand, Computer Futures [2]' Andrew Nitek says: "There is still a market out there. Recently, there were a couple of companies that went into administration like [Woolworths' distribution arm] Entertainment UK. They were a big AS/400 site but all the staff found new jobs, pretty much. It shows that there are opportunities."

Computer Futures is one of the very few big IT recruitment firms to still have an IBM i division and has been finding positions for midrange job hunters for 20 years. Nitek says that i-oriented jobs tend to come up through staff turnover more than anything else. There are also opportunities created when UK firms bring offshore IT operations back home. He describes developer and technical consultant roles as at the more "dynamic" end of the market along with skills in insurance applications, System 21, Synon and JD Edwards.

"Those guys would tend to pick up jobs," says Nitek. "While they won’t get millions of openings, what you tend to find is that there won’t be that much competition and because they’ve been specialising in a niche area for so long they tend to be quite well regarded."

However, skills are a key factor. "You do get some old-school manufacturing companies that still have an AS/400 and they have got a programmer who can maybe keep the system ticking over but their programming skills aren’t necessarily cutting edge. A lot of them still use RPG III, so those types of people will probably find it a lot harder to get work but I think providing people can stay at the cutting edge of the field then they do tend to pick up jobs."

From a programming point of view that means fluency in RPG ILE, says Nitek, something some job candidates claim on their CVs but fail to live up to in technical tests. IBM certification also helps.

"If someone is wanting to stay at the top of the game then they do tend to be quite well," he says. "Even in a bad market place someone good will still pick up jobs but there are obviously less opportunities in the current market because a lot of companies have got big recruitment freezes on and less people move around which creates less openings. But we are still getting a handful of jobs through. It’s gone down since last year but I think that’s probably the same with most areas of recruitment, even outside of IT."

By Nitek's reckoning, a good programmer should be getting anywhere between £28K and £50K per annum. Pay at the lower end of that scale could be due to an employer taking advantage of a generally depressed job market. At the higher end, the job would probably be London-based and require up-to-date ILE skills and some good non-i knowledge. Technical specialists who really know their hardware and are IBM-certified often work for IBM business partners and can earn between £45K and £60K. JDE and Synon specialists are looking at between £40K and £50K.

Nitek says: "It depends a lot on things like location and what industry the person’s in. The banks typically used to pay a lot more than your standard manufacturing companies. I think that the biggest thing for me is that it surprises me how many companies out there still do use the platform. Obviously, we know most of the main sites but I will still get a CV in from someone and I have never heard of that company before."