The UK tech sector is showing signs of recovery as job vacancies in the industry increased  50% since a low point in July of last year.

The data comes from by Adzuna and Dealroom for Tech Nation and the Government’s Digital Economy Council.

There were 106,000 IT-related vacancies in March, falling to a low point of 50,367 in July, it reports.

But vacancy rates began increasing again in July and are now accumulating at a rate of 2.6% a month, reaching 75,353 in November.

The most in-demand role in the UK is software developer, with over 31,000 vacancies.

More specialised programming roles, such as NET developers and Java developers, are also sought after across the regions leading to higher salaries.

For instance, network security specialists who oversee networks and prevent security threats, have seen salaries increase 69% on average this year to £85,894.

Four cities – Oxford, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow – achieved more VC investment than last year, according to the data.

Oxford has also overtaken Cambridge to be the number two city for tech investment in the UK, after London.

Oxford’s start-ups and scaleups raised $532m in investment this year, thanks to interest in the city’s dynamic health-related companies such as biotech unicorn Oxford Nanopore which raised $84.4m in October.

Gerard Grech, Chief Executive, Tech Nation said: “The UK’s tech businesses have faced one of the biggest upheavals in a century to pull in $15bn – a greater investment than that achieved in the whole of Europe combined.

“At Tech Nation we have been delighted to continue supporting these incredible businesses and are on track to support over 1000 tech scale-ups by March 2022, delivering over $1Bn of Gross Value Add to the UK economy.”

Ronan Harris, VP and MD, UK and Ireland, Google added: “This is an exciting time to be part of the UK tech industry. Dynamic businesses are born out of challenging times and the investment going into UK startups and scaleups is a clear sign that investors think UK companies are the ones to watch. Google is very happy to be a part of this ecosystem and looks forward to the next year.”