Published on the 12/12/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
Skilled IT staff looking for work across Australia and New Zealand could take heart from a pair of reports released this week that suggest employee demand may be starting to challenge supply again…
The IT Contract and Recruitment Association this week released its ICT Job Market Report which notes that in October recruiters across A/NZ were finding it took much longer to find candidates for roles than in the past. The contrast was particularly stark in South Australia where the time taken to fill a role leapt from nine to 25 days.
ITCRA CEO Julie Mills said that it previously took between five to 10 days to fill IT roles whereas the latest data showed recruiters were now taking 13 to 25 days. “October appears to have been a busy time for the industry and the market is becoming increasingly more competitive,” said Mills.
The news however prompted lively debate on the Whirlpool forum with posts from IT professionals suggesting that part of the problem was unrealistic expectations of employers in terms of the salaries on offer for the experience being sought. Also, while ITCRA noted that the problem was particularly acute in Canberra, Whirlpool commentary pointed to this being a bi-product of onerous security clearances required for many ACT-based positions.
There was also a degree of skepticism about the overall thrust of the report with some forecasting ITCRA might use the statistics to request that caps on 457 visas be loosened in order to be able to bring in more overseas IT workers to meet rising demand.
The ITCRA ICT Job Market Report found that when comparing Australian with New Zealand demand the greatest disparity was in terms of need for .Net developers – which were in the top slot in NZ and ranked only sixth in Australia.
In terms of education and experience the two markets are broadly similar. There is a preference for Bachelors/Honours Degree (69 percent in Australia, 75 percent in New Zealand), and between one and seven years’ experience. Very few organisations required more than seven years’ experience.
Looking out into 2015, the most recent Hudson Report into employment trends points to a strong outlook with employer intentions to hire at their highest level since early 2012.
Hudson says this also points to growth in contractor demand with 23.7 per cent of organisations saying they want to hire ICT contractors in the first quarter of the year.
According to Dean Davidson, Hudson’s executive general manager; “ICT is fast becoming the dominant force behind the contracting market in Australia. We have seen demand for strong project managers increase over the past 18 months as large transformation projects have reached implementation stage, and we don’t see this changing in the New Year.”
