Here is our market update for January 2022, showing you the latest stats and trends from the technology scene in Newcastle.

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Transcription

James MacDonald:

– Hey, James McDonald here from NewyTechPeople. Welcome to our first market update video for 2022. For those of you that aren’t regular watchers of this segment or update, why don’t we look at the seek statistics for the amount of jobs being posted in the technology space within Newcastle and hunter region.

So essentially what it does is it gives a bit of an indication on what the hiring market looks like, how many jobs are being advertised in that technology space. So to start with what we’ll do
is have a quick overview of 2021. So As a whole, we had 1,676 jobs posted in that Newcastle technology space. 1600 jobs over 1600 jobs is a pretty big number.That’s up 21% on the year before. So 2020, not the best year to compare against it was a rough year with, the first lot of COVID lockdown. I think a lot of businesses have more fear first time around in 2020, than in 21, a lot of business were prepared for that.

So 21% increase. What is showing is the market has really recovered, companies really trying to hire in that technology space. As we lead into 2022, in January, we had 141 jobs posted in the month and that was up 28% year on year. So a good strong indicator that 2022 will be a strong market again for technology professionals. The biggest challenge in the market at the moment is that Australia in technology is candidate short. So for a time now we’ve had borders shut or people not coming into, into Australia on skilled visas, especially in that technology space.

And at the beginning of COVID, we also lost a lot of people that were here on skilled visas. You compound that on the top of a lot of companies are now hiring fully remote. So companies in the major cities around Australia are now competing for talent across Australia, and you’ve got international companies also offering fully remote international roles, targeting Australian technology talents, a real skill shortage across Australia. A lot of companies also investing in technology, which makes again greater need lesser talent, you know, shortage of talent and

A challenging market. The seek stats used to always be a really good indicator on the strength of market. It’d be really interesting to have a look at in 2022. So what’s happened is Seek have increased their prices for job posting again, pretty significantly like 20 plus percent, again, as part of like a two year role out for them increasing their prices. What it should do they hope is increase the quality of the ads. So there’d be less reposting of the same job over and over.

If you increase price, you probably not going to repost a crappy job ad time and time again. So that’s what they are hoping for, but on the same thing, technology talent are in demand at the moment. So there aren’t a lot of people out there applying for jobs. So we’re in a pretty interesting position right now and we’ll see how that plays out this year. Across the board nothing has changed. The market’s strong. Technology candidates are in demand. If you’re a technology professional, there are good chances and opportunity available for you in the market. At the moment, if you are prepared to have a look around. For companies, It’s a really challenging market. What’s also further challenging is most people are now using flexibility as a tool. Flexibility used to be a real big driver or a nice point of difference.

Flexibility is now being offered by nearly everyone. Everyone’s got a different version of flexibility. It might be a day in the office might be a couple of days in the office might be flexibility start times finish times. It might be flexibility on whether. You have a compressed week. Everyone has a different version of flexibility at the moment, but everyones offering it.
It’s nearly a must have now. So again, candidate power has driven that change. So flexibility is now pretty much a given for most candidates. And they’ll get that in any job that they choose to go to. Tech stack. Most people are moving to a more modern tech stack.

If you’re running a real legacy, old school tech stack, and you’re, you’re wanting somebody to come in and be working on that. It might be hard to find somebody prepared to do that. So again, salaries are continuing to increase just because companies are fighting for that talent. There’s a big shortage there.

And if you can’t compete on flexibility because everyone’s offering it, there aren’t too many other leavers besides the industries that might be appealing to some people, but salaries are continuing to be something that’s being used to try to, I guess, set companies apart from others.So I think it’s going to be another challenging year in 2022 for technology recruitment, a lot of companies trying to hire really good talent. Well I can say. Put your best foot forward, try and shorten up that hiring process. Shorten out that interview process, put your best foot forward when it comes to offers and what you can offer from a flexibility standpoint.

And good luck out there. Be back in February end of February for an update and see how we’re progressing throughout the shortest month of the year. Thanks for listening to this one.

See you next month.