Faster rises in salaries
AUSTRALIAN salaries for vacant jobs grew by 4.1 per cent over the past financial year – well ahead of the 2.6 per cent official figure for wage growth – according to a new survey.
The lift in new salaries in a tight labour market suggests the pay outlook is not as bleak as predicted, with the potential for a flow-on effect to wages across the economy.
The figure, released on Monday ahead of the government’s Jobs and Skills Summit, is based on data from the more than 200,000 new job ads on the SEEK online employment marketplace each month.
The SEEK Advertised Salary Index (ASI) measures salaries for vacant roles and is being promoted as a complement to the Wage Price Index (WPI), which measures change across all jobs.
The company’s managing director, Kendra Banks, said the index was not a replacement for government sources but “a lens on the economy” that complemented the WPI and other measures.
She said SEEK had seen a small change in labour supply over Covid, but a very dramatic change in demand (a 58.2 per cent increase in ads between February 2020 and July 2022) leading to a 64 per cent fall in that period in the average number of applications per job.
SEEK’s senior economist Matt Cowgill said the strength across the labour market was different from other labour booms.
“If you think about previous times of low unemployment, such as the mining boom, some parts were doing well and some were not,” he said. “(It was) the two-speed economy, but we’re not seeing that now. The labour market has been almost uniformly strong.”
The index reveals the average salary offered is $85,409 but average salaries range from $130,121 in IT, to $98,041 for HR workers, $76,952 for education and training, and $58,438 for retail and consumer products.
In the 12 months to July 2022, the biggest pay rises were 7.3 per cent in design and architecture, 6.2 per cent in IT, and 6.1 per cent in trades and services.
Several industries saw rises of more than 3 per cent but five categories were below 2 per cent – legal (1.7 per cent), community services and development, and education and training (1.6 per cent); government (1.4 per cent) and science and technology (0.6 per cent).
But over the course of the pandemic, advertised salaries grew faster for the lowest paid – 7.1 per cent compared with 4.3 per cent for the highest paid jobs.
Mr Cowgill said the relatively low growth in the ACT was in part because salaries
there did not fall as much as in other states in the acute stages of the pandemic because public service -dominated employment is less sensitive to economic changes.