The vast majority of my time and effort is currently fulfilled within the financial services PM area. The market is booming. It seems like every insurance organisation, banking group and Life + Pensions establishment are competing against each other for contract Project Management resources. The race is on to get the best people and from personal experience I can categorically confirm that there aren’t that many through-and-through financial services PMs sitting at home with their phones remaining silent.
To quote one of my contract Programme Managers yesterday, “My phone is so red hot from receiving vast amounts of calls at the moment, I’m going to have to consider changing my number. I’ve never, ever known activity like this” – and this coming from a highly experienced Life + Pensions / Banking Programme Manager who’s been contracting in the UK for over 15 years!
His contract is currently up for renewal, and the number of potential options he has on offer is frightening. If the market carries on like this, surely the simple economic model of supply and demand can only lead to one outcome – rates are going to go up, and substantially!
But even if rates do go up, the simple fact that there is a genuine shortage of good quality financial services PMs is going to cause considerable pain for a number of large institutions.
So why is there such high demand?
There are a variety of major Financial Services Authority (FSA) led regulations that have caused a large increase in business PM requirements, such as Liquidity Reporting, Solvency II etc. And there are also some major integration / merger programmes currently underway that are utilising even more resource – e.g. the Lloyds / HBoS integration, the Co-Op / Britannia integration and the Nationwide Building Society’s attempts for UK domination of the Building Society market!
I’m lucky enough to have been heavily involved with both the Lloyds Integration programme across the UK and Nationwide’s take-over of a number of other UK Building Societies, and between the two of them they have swallowed up a large amount of the PM resource across the UK, with the demands still ongoing.
Good candidates are key
Over the 12 years or so I’ve spent in IT + Business Change recruitment, traditionally I’ve always been most excited when I receive a new vacancy from a client. However, in the current market I’m much more inclined to think that my commission is going to go up when I find a good candidate! If that PM will work for sensible rates (!) then I’ll be very confident that I’ll be able to find them a job. All I need next is for them to refer a colleague of theirs to me, so I can find them a job as well!!
To me, this is the best way to identify new candidates – after all, most people will only refer someone to me who they rate highly, otherwise it would reflect badly on them. So in short, there’s loads of financial services PM roles across the UK, there’s not many candidates available, the demand doesn’t look like reducing, the rates look like rising, and if you know anyone who’s looking for work, please please please pass them my details!!!
The Future?
I’m not sure what’s going to happen when all these programmes start winding up and all these contractors suddenly start looking for work, but I guess we’ll worry about that when / if that happens – hopefully not for a long time yet!!
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Posted on July 2, 2010 by Martyn Cattermole
Well, I have noticed this as well however for those PMs WITHOUT FS experience the market has collapsed especially for those who have specialised in the public sector.
When FS role descriptions make retail banking or some other such FS experience mandatory it excludes lots of good PMs. A bit frustrating for the rest of us! Martyn