Tech sector on the hunt
Tech-savvy workers are not just sought in Australia but all over the world, with shortages in many sectors and countries.
ABOUT 81,000 extra information and communication technology (ICT) workers are forecast to be needed from 2016 to 2022 – and many will be in roles that do not exist yet.
Australia’s Digital Pulse 2017, by Deloitte and the Australian Computer Society, reveals 40,000 ICT jobs were created from 2014 to 2016 and the workforce is projected to grow to 722,000 in the next six years.
It represents a forecast average annual growth of 2 per cent compared to 1.4 per cent for the general workforce.
Among the new jobs are expected to be 28,000 management and operations roles, 27,000 technical and professional roles, 7000 trade roles and 3000 sales roles.
ACS president Anthony Wong says technology skills are fast becoming the “engine room” of the Australian economy.
CSIRO Data61 group leader and senior principal researcher Dr Fang Chen says jobs are being created that have not existed in the past.
“I wouldn’t classify them simply as IT but they are around digital, especially using data and using it smartly and differently,” she says.
“(The demand is in) high-end, machine learning-relevant areas – the people who can really create solutions and algorithms. It’s not very easy to hire people with that skill.
“The second (area of demand is in) identifying problems and proposing a list of ways to look into that. They don’t necessarily write the algorithms but point us in the right direction.”
Fang says if jobseekers want longterm prospects, data science is a good choice as the volume of data is so overwhelming. “It’s worthwhile for everyone, male and female,” she says.
Louise Vorpagel, people and culture lead of tech company Red Eye, looks for tech workers who are passionate about continual learning.
“We are constantly improving technology so we need to be able to hire people that can re-skill and learn more coding languages as they become available,” she says. “There is an immediate skill drought in iOS and mobile phone programming.”
Red Eye recently ran an iOS workshop which attracted so much interest they plan to run another soon.