Employment trends for the year ahead in the tech sector

Job vacancies and recruitment within IT continues to rise, especially in retail and manufacturing.   We are also seeing a steady demand for candidates with cloud experience.  Meanwhile, IT salaries remain stable, some roles reporting a decline in remuneration whilst increases are reported in niche areas such as Network Designers, DevOps experts and Virtualisation Specialists.

During the next 12 months, we expect companies to increase their use of digital tools such as big data and analytics to drive deeper customer engagement.  This means successful job candidates must know how to use big data to identify trends, risks and opportunities and specific business actions.  The use of virtualisation, cloud technologies, open source data tools and applications that combine data sets to create value are also on the rise.  Those with skills in these areas are able to command premium salaries.

Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration and Deployment are now typical in the development space including Microsoft development.  Candidates with experience working with these methodologies are extremely rare.  A number of Microsoft houses require candidates with skills such as TeamCity and Jenkins but available talent is snapped up quickly.

In other technology trends for the year ahead, is an ongoing reliance on digital technology with the continued growth of mobile apps in order to increase customers and revenue as well as the rise of the Internet of Things.  This has seen demand increase for skills in front end areas, development, and in UX and UI (especially designers with expertise in the full Adobe Creative Suite).

In our research we have also seen a major shift to more scalable and flexible platforms from leading software companies such as Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft.  This means employers are now more focused on retaining technical Web Developers and Mobile Developers who understand digital processes and the end user experience, as well as possessing strong technical knowledge in development.  Contractors are still being frequently used to increase project speed and to support internal teams.

Read more about recruitment trends for over 1,000 roles in our annual Salary Guide.  Our findings are based on a survey of over 245,000 New Zealand employees.

by Jason Walker, Managing Director of Hays in New Zealand