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ICT Trends – Vibrant Growth

ICT Sector in Growth Mode

The MBIE ICT sector report for 2015 heralds New Zealand’s vibrant, fast-growing ICT sector with an emphasis on the services sector where;

The number of businesses topped 10,000 for the first time in 2014

Employment grew by over 2,800 in the year to June 2014

Exports of IT services grew at a compound annual growth rate of 14% in the six years to 2014

Computer services are leading growth in business investment in R&D in NZ with IT stocks currently valued at 10% of the value of all listings

The sector is enjoying strong employment growth with an additional 7,500 jobs added since 2010, 2,800 of these in the last year alone. Half of these are in Auckland, with a further 27 percent in Wellington. Recruitment in this sector is difficult with firms citing applicants’ lack of qualifications and experience as being the main reason that vacancies are hard to fill.

Between 2012 and 2014 people employed in ICT-related occupations grew by 20 percent, from 62,300 to 74,900. In terms of business and employment the number of computer system design firms (encompassed within the Professional Services sector) topped 10,000 for the first time in 2014, with 40 of these employing more than 100 people. The highest growth in ICT occupations, outside of the Professional Services sector, was in construction with an additional 2,590 ICT jobs driven mainly by the ultrafast broadband roll-out.

Employment Growth

Demand for skills is one of the key themes that emerged, with increased use of ICT across the economy generating employment growth across a range of skill-sets, including software engineering and development, project managers, marketers, sales, administrators and business analysts. More computer system design firms reported vacancies than any other sector in the economy; 89 percent of the vacancies were for managers or professionals and technicians.

The report specifies three main “actions to improve skills availability” including;

Growing the innovation workforce

Strengthening tertiary education and

Attracting skilled migrants

Only time will tell whether the detailed actions listed under these heading (page 25 in the report) will bring about the desired results.

Fast-Trending Tech Skills

Dice recently released a report on the fastest trending jobs for Tech Pros., based on an analysis of its online job postings. According to Dice a number of these sought-after tech skills have become increasingly vital for industries ranging from marketing to analytics.

Table 1 contains a selection of the top 10 skillsets listed in the report, based on the NZ job listings resulting from a filtered search of the Seek ICT job website.

Ranking Tech Pro Skills

(USA)

Application Average Salary

(US Dollars)

Seek ICT Job Vacancies

(19th May)

1 Cloudera Impala An open-source MPP SQL query engine for mining data stored in Apache Hadoop clusters.

$139,874 0

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Ranking Tech Pro Skills

(USA)

Application Average Salary

(US Dollars)

Seek ICT Job Vacancies

(19th May)

2 Adobe

Experience Manager

A tool designed for organizing and managing creative assets - popular among marketers, advertising-agency creative professionals and others who craft content.

$123,599 3

3 Ansible An open-source tool to help System administrators to configure and manage PCs.

$124,860 3

4 Xamarin For the rapid building of iOS and Android apps.

$101,707 4

6 Laravel One of the more popular open-source PHP Web application frameworks.

$96,219 6

8 (HP) Unified Functional

Testing

Enables comprehensive testing of software platforms and ecosystems.

$102,419 1

Table 1 Fastest Trending Tech Pro Skills

Seek ICT Job Adverts

May Seek ICT job adverts for all NZ have increased markedly, up 13.3 percent on the April figures and ahead of May 2014 figures by 11.4 percent (Fig.1).

Fig.1 Seek ICT Job Adverts Monthly Trends 2010 –2015 (May)

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The month of May has seen a big jump in Trademe IT job adverts, up 25 percent on the April figure of 899 and 22 percent above the figure for May 2014 (Fig.2).

Fig.2 Seek ICT & Trademe IT Job Advert Trends to May 2015

Seek ICT job adverts for the three major regions of Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury are all

ahead of the 2014 figures for the same month, up 6 percent, 19 percent and 2.5 percent

respectively. The monthly increases indicated in figure 3 below are in stark contrast to last month’s

decreases (Refer to Fig.4 for specific monthly job advert numbers).

Fig.3 Seek ICT Job Advert Trends Monthly Change for May 2015

Figure 4 provides a detailed record of the Seek ICT job advert trends by region to May 2015.

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Fig.4 Seek ICT Job Advert Monthly Trends to May 2015

Conclusion

New Zealand’s IT services sector continues to grow at a rate that creates challenges, particularly in finding the highly skilled IT professionals needed to fill the rising number of vacancies. This is a worldwide problem and the NZ government will need to continue working with industry and with professional bodies in order to address this challenge.

The healthy increase in this month’s Seek ICT job advert numbers are in sharp contrast to the fall in job numbers in March and April, and have risen above the figures for the same period in 2013 and 2014, a first for this year. While this is good news for job seekers it could be challenging for the industry as it competes in the global market for suitably qualified and experienced personnel.

The rise and fall of skill rankings change all the time, due to the shifting popularity of platforms and the preferences of influential companies and developers. In spite of the relatively few Seek ICT job listings in Table 1 for the Dice fastest trending jobs for Tech Pros the skillsets may nonetheless be indicative of similar shifting trends here in NZ. Time will tell!

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News Bytes: A to Z

Australia – TechRepublic: Job skills for tech pros: 4 of the fastest-trending

Dice has just released its list of the fastest-trending tech skills for tech pros.

NZ – CITRENZ: Newsletter: Positive Outlook Contrasts with Fewer Jobs

Forty-four percent of the total job adverts for the top skills in demand are based in Auckland.

NZ – IITP: Another Tech Recruiting Effort, this time in Texas

Chronic shortage of ICT skills is forcing employers to hire from overseas.

NZ – NZ Business Herald: Capital Markets: Auckland's magnetic centre

ICT is our fastest growing sector.

SA – The Guardian: Oracle, CWG, Others Reveal Ways to End IT Skill Shortages

In the software and applications development space there is a shortage of developers, especially in Nigeria where the digital economy is expected to grow exponentially.

UK (Scotland) – Polly Purvis: Scotland’s IT skills shortage needs addressed

Some 80,000 people work in digital technology roles in Scotland, in software development, telecoms, IT services and digital agencies.

UK – ComputerWeekly: Europe rallies together to solve digital skills crisis

Europe draws up the Riga Declaration, which sets out 10 principles to unlock the potential of e-skills to boost growth and job creation across the continent.

UK – The Online Recruitment Resource: North East HE Career Advisors Discover Potential of Digital Careers at Exclusive Leeds Event

EC Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs has predicted a shortage of up to 900,000 ICT professionals by 2020.

USA – ComputerWorld: IT Salary Survey 2015

Key findings from ComputerWorld survey of more than 4,800 IT professionals.

USA – ComputerWorld: All hail the next big job, the Chief IoT Officer

Creation of more chiefs may be on its way.