The recovery is getting crowded
After two months of recovery, the consulting market lost some momentum in October.
Assignment volume remained clearly above last year, but consultant availability continued to grow and the Unassignment Index rose sharply.
📊 Assignments & competition
Assignment volume eased from September’s unusually high level but remained 10.3% above October last year.
Available consultants increased by 18.8% from September and by 22.3% year-on-year. With assignment volume falling month-on-month and growing by only 10.3% year-on-year, consultant availability grew faster than demand in both comparisons.
Brainville’s three-month Unassignment Index, UIX, rose by 1.2 percentage points to 7.68%, now 0.2 points above last year. The monthly reading reached 9.0%, up 1.3 points from September and 0.7 points year-on-year.
Registration activity remained exceptionally high for the third consecutive month. Registrations decreased by 8.9% from September but were still 44.7% higher than in October last year.
The growth is also becoming more geographically distributed, with clear relative increases in several of Brainville’s smaller markets.
Growing participation in Brainville may partly contribute to the increase in available consultants, so the figures should not be interpreted as a pure market effect. Even so, the higher UIX suggests that competition for assignments increased in October.
🏠 Remote work
The share of assignments offering remote or hybrid work increased slightly from 41.7% to 42.6%.
• Fully remote: 6.9%
• Hybrid: 35.7%
👩💻 Roles
Compared with September, the share of the market increased for:
↑ Developers: approximately +3 percentage points
↑ Engineers: approximately +2 points
↑ DataX: approximately +1 point
The following roles decreased:
↓ Project Managers: approximately −2.5 percentage points
↓ Solution Architects: approximately −1.5 points
↓ Testers: approximately −1 point
The role volumes are relatively small, so these changes should be treated as indications rather than broad market shifts.
Overall, October did not erase the recovery: assignment volume remained clearly above last year. But the balance shifted in favour of buyers, with more available consultants and a higher UIX.
📷 The photo is from a run along the left branch of the Regnitz, close to Bamberg’s historic centre. The city is best known for its old town, but the paths along the river are just as good a way to explore it.