Demand for skilled IT professionals continues to be high in Australia

Certified security system architects and managers continue to be in short supply, with the growth of Cloud based technologies creating a need for Cloud specialists with SaaS and IaaS experience, according to the latest quarterly report from Hays recruitment.

The industry is popular with qualified and skilled people from around the world who can find jobs in Australia thanks to the demand and lack of suitable candidates in the country.

“We are seeing a spike in the number of organisations of all types leveraging technology to create or manage transformational change as well as more non-tech departments learning how to use the latest technology to help them perform tasks in new way,” said Nick Deligiannis, Hays Australia managing director.

He pointed out that there really is no sector or department not exposed to technological change these days and employers are looking for solid technical skills and strong soft skills that enable them to engage proactively and successfully with non-technical stakeholders. However, candidates with this combination are rare.

“In the public sector we are seeing considerable permanent hiring to build team capability but also to contain costs while the private sector is using a combination of permanent and temporary hiring to suit differing business needs,” he explained.

However, he pointed out that small businesses are increasingly outsourcing service desk and storage needs to cut costs and some larger companies are starting to move their internal support offshore to save money and as a result there are fewer lower to middle level IT support roles around.

Companies that do have in-house IT support teams however, regard soft skills as equally important to technical skills when assessing candidates and small to medium businesses across the country are therefore looking for candidates with a broad technical skill set that enables them to be utilised across different projects.

“We predict continued demand for business-savvy candidates who possess strong communication skills as well as solid technical skills. In general, niche skill sets remain hard to come by with the majority of highly skilled candidates in full time employment,” Deligiannis added.

According to the report there is a huge supply gap in the market for Dynamics CRM Developers, alongside .Net Developers for both web and desktop systems, capable of delivering customised solutions with strong SharePoint experience to work in integrated development environments.

Agile Project Managers and Agile Business Analysts are also highly sought, while Application Project Managers with software implementation experience and Implementation Consultants equally in demand.

As Cloud based technologies grow, Deligiannis said candidates with Amazon Web Services (AWS) skills are in particularly short supply with vendor/supplier management skills needed to help companies moving towards AWS and other cloud providers and specific to Cloud, specialists with SaaS and IaaS experience are able to help realise cost efficiencies are a hiring priority for many employers.

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