Working in maintenance? Stop reading, we need you in the server room

You're undervalued, says survey. But you knew this...

Average annual salaries for maintenance jobs advertised online fell by 7.5 per cent this year - but the firm behind the analysis has warned that we shouldn’t forget about the humans who look after systems just yet.

According to figures released today by jobs search engine Adzuna, the average annual salary of maintenance jobs advertised in the UK last year was £32,672. That’s down 7.5 per cent on the previous year.

This is compared with a 1 per cent decline across all advertised UK job salaries, and a 1.6 per cent increase over the past six months.

Doug Monro, co-founder of the firm, said that this put maintenance jobs - defined as those requiring people to keep equipment and machines in tip top condition - as one of the worst-performing jobs in this year’s survey.

“There can be a stigma attached to maintenance jobs due to their physically intensive nature, and the decline in salaries year-on-year places them among the worst-performing jobs,” Monro said.

But the report reasoned that, although automation might take over from some manual and traditional jobs, it was too soon to write off maintenance roles altogether.

“The rise of the robots is all well and good, but we will still need humans on hand to ensure automated equipment is working as it should be,” said Monro.

“Maintenance jobs should be given better recognition as skills at all levels are necessary if we are to reap the benefits of a high-tech, productive and efficient post-Brexit economy.”

On top of the somewhat loose idea of giving maintenance jobs more "recognition", Adzuna adds that companies should improve workers’ pay packages.

A sector performing even less well than maintenance is consultancy, which has seen average advertised salaries fall by 26.9 per cent to £35,839 - although that won't include any jobs that aren't advertised on the job sites Adzua scraped.

The stats were calculated by scraping 500 job ad sites for all vacancies, which were then, normalised, de-duplicated and mix-adjusted before being used to assess the job market. ®