The ICT jobs market in Australia and globally is going through a transformation with a significant shift to hybrid roles bringing formerly siloed skills such as IT, marketing and business together into one role.
In its first annual review of the main drivers of the staffing sector in launching its professional staffing trends review 2016 on Thursday, the Information Technology Contract and Recruitment Association (ITCRA) reveals that the new segment of “high paying” hybrid positions doesn’t require programming training and are open to those professionals with non-traditional qualifications like computer science.
And, in a sign of the times, in the US market, ICT jobs have grown by just 7% compared to hybrid roles which have grown 53%% with the demand for data scientists tripling over the same period.
ITCRA says the same trend towards hybrid roles is occurring in Australia.
{loadposition peter}According to the ITCRA review, job postings for data scientists grew from 80 in 2012 to 400 in 2015, while digital marketing postings have quadrupled to 2400, and mobile app developer job postings almost doubled to 4046 over the same time.
“What this says to me is that it is a great opportunity to encourage students to not focus on one area of study, and for employers and the education sector to build this skilled workforce so that we don’t see a shortage of skills in the future,” says ITCRA CEO, Julie Mills.
The ITCRA report also highlights the “misalignment” of ANZSCO titles with the actual roles in the market. ANZSCO is the Australia and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations system that collects, publishes and analyses occupation statistics across government agencies.
The report found that under the current ANZSCO classifications the top three roles filled were ICT Project Manager, Systems Analyst and Development Programmer.
But, Mills says that, interestingly, these same roles were not reflected in SkillsMatch or Burning Glass data of top jobs advertised or filled, as other role titles were used to describe those roles.
“In our analysis, we found at least 15 alternative titles were associated with each of these roles, such as deployment manager, scrum master and technical lead which relate to ICT project manager,” Mills says.
“These ever changing role descriptions are a reflection of market demand. We see employers seeking to attract the best talent through differentiating roles while making the titles accurately reflect the nuance of the role and the skill set required.”
Mills says the report is valuable to the staffing sector, educators and governments, who are in a position to influence, change and drive the employment agenda.
“If Australia is to have leading edge industries we must know the skill sets of emerging occupations. With this insight we can encourage our young talent to consider these opportunities, nurture them through education and technology while making them highly employable.
“The Professional Staffing Review is ITCRA’s contribution to this important discussion.”