Looking back on 2011

2011 was a strong growth year for the technology job market. The overall volume of roles across the market expanded by 5% quarter-on-quarter until Q4 (calendar) when we saw some flattening in demand, although no slowing in the pace of activity - hirers still felt the heightened pulse of the market.

As we saw during the market recovery, the roles that continued to provide challenges through shortages were those intrinsic to software and product development; 
* Developers
* Business Analysts
* Project Managers
* Testers

Outside of general churn there was relatively flat demand within roles that fell into:
* Telecommunications (outside of some niche roles driven by 2degrees' phenomenal growth)
* Infrastructure and networking (servers, desktops etc)
* Mid-senior level management

The unwillingness of candidates to put their hands up to move from the security of their existing jobs onto these roles provided a challenge, with our advertising response (to placement) down 7.5% from 2010.


What to expect in 2012

You'll probably not spill your coffee to hear that we suspect that the market will provide exacerbated hiring challenges this year. Why? The people market is like any other – it’s governed by the laws of supply and demand:

Demand:
* Government has indicated a willingness to invest more in IT. There are already 4 projects underway in Wellington with a 7 figure development budget attached. This is in addition to the water and feed work that has kept the capital running near capacity
* Enterprise has sat on its thumbs for too long - they are keen to explore moving more applications to the Cloud and otherwise their ageing infrastructure desperately needs a refresh. 
* Telcos have had a few tough years but Telecom's separation should produce focus and growth, Telstra is bullish, Vodafone needs a game changer and 2Degrees is running at about 900 degrees. 
* SMBs have seen some leans times after weathering the storm in 2009/2010 so well and this area may be static (but due to scope doesn’t have the large scale market impact that projects of 25+ people does and thus becomes less material).
* Add into this the international stage recovering - UK jobs up by 25% this year on previous and the USA seeing growth and the lowest level of unemployment in 3 years. Whilst positive news for the global economy this bodes negatively for NZ due to our mobile and attractively skilled workforce heading once more offshore.

Supply
I'm going to beat the same drum I'm afraid folks. As you'll know from my previous installments, New Zealand is approaching a chronic talent shortfall due to dwindling numbers of local IT graduates (down 45% in 5 years with demand increasing by 10%). Immigration is our other key market stoker and with the observed increase in demand from the UK and USA (Australia, India, China etc) our 'share' of people relocating globally will become contracted as people will choose these other markets over ours.

The manifestation of this current shortfall is the issue with recruiting for people at an intermediate level; consider this in conjunction with Kiwi's travel propensity and you can foresee the hole in supply for senior level candidates further down the path.

So what skills will this heating market need?
Outside of increased demand for the usual applications development crowd (Java and .Net) we predict a marked increase in demand for mobile (android and iPhone) apps developers, Cloud applications specialists and the ERP space.

What can you do about this?
I see three different solutions open to us all - ordered in timeframe to usefulness;

1. Get better at recruiting people from offshore - this is an immediate solution but requires a leap of faith in many instances. Mitigate your risk by implementing a 90 day trial in the contract (contact us for a free example written by NZ's top employment lawyer).
2. Where possible take people from the business into IT roles (the classic examples being SME's for application implementations and users becoming testers). More lateral thinking is required for making a mechanic a desktop support guy but consider the break fix similarities...
3. Tell your siblings, kids, nieces/nephews, friends’ kids, postie, barrista (anyone youngish and smartish) etc about the wonderful opportunities available in the ICT market and encourage them to train or retrain in this area!

Or you could get better at hiring contractors...

Tune in next month for how to create a useful and relevant mobile (contractor) workforce.