Contrasting the upheaval of recent geopolitical events, the local IT jobs market continues its calm and orderly transition out of its long-term slump. In this IT Jobs market update, we unveil our latest salary snapshot, look at what’s happening in the market and dust off the old crystal ball as we look to the future.
Global Volatility
The health of the local IT jobs market is strongly influenced by a combination local and global forces. From a global perspective, the Vix global volatility index measures uncertainty or fear. The level of uncertainly in global markets directly affects appetite for investment, a subset of that being tech investments. And this in turn affects the local jobs market.
In response to the Trump tariff announcements in early April, the Vix Index went through the roof as stock markets crashed, with the fear measure increasing from 18 to 53 points within 10 days. As seen in the graph, the index peaked during the GFC in 2008 and during early Covid in 2020. Over the last month the index has dropped back to where it was before the tariff announcement, though still higher than a year ago. Thankfully, the spectre of a global trade meltdown has somewhat diminished, and the biggest fear for the Australian tech sector, a tariff on IT services, has retreated from possible to fanciful.
So, whilst the world remains extremely volatile, the major threats to the local jobs market have receded significantly… for now.
Local Stability
At Balance, we continued to see the IT jobs market slowly warm up over the last few months, this momentum should only be increased by recent rate cuts and an election with a clear outcome.
For the last couple of years, the market has been tilted in favour of employers, with many more candidates than jobs. Unsurprisingly, our latest Salary Snapshot published today, shows the laws of supply and demand have finally gained the upper hand over the resistance from the cost-of-living crisis. Some, but not all rates and salaries have started to come off the boil.
Project Services: The old saying which notes ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, was clearly not written about the local IT jobs market. Poor old ‘HMAS Project Manager/Business Analyst’ is slowly sinking whilst a flotilla of ‘SS Technical Roles’ bob along on the slowly rising tide. Essentially, we’ve seen PM and BA rates and salaries come off by about 10%.
UX Designers and DevOps: I believe we are seeing the latter stages of the maturation of the job market for these roles. As is often the case, when a new role/tech/function is broadly adopted across the industry, demand races ahead of supply. It’s taken a decade, but finally we’re seeing the availability of skills meeting demand.
Network and Cloud Engineers: the rates have trimmed marginally mainly signalling (finally) the end of Covid-era excesses.
Modern Workplace Engineers: Unlike UX Designers and DevOps roles which are at the end of the adoption curve, the market for Modern Workplace roles is still relative immature with adoption well ahead of supply. Having said that, the supply vs demand differential is not as bad as it was, thus we’re not forecasting any major uplift in rates beyond today’s increase.
Looking forward: Outside of the project space rates are very resilient, and are likely to remain so. The team at Balance are expecting technical (software and infrastructure), support and delivery roles to remain in this fairly balanced state for the medium term. This prediction is tempered by the fact that every other balanced market we’ve worked in over the last 25 years has been fleeting to say the least, i.e. we moved from balanced to boom or bust in the blink of an eye.
Mega Project
One of the key impediments to the local market over the last few years has been a lack of mega-projects. However, there is a whopper over at Westpac, where they are around a year into the 5 year $1 billion+ Unite Program. This is a platform simplification program whose impact on the market should be felt as the year progresses. The word from inside Westpac, is that the initial analysis phase across most streams of work is taking time, and that the core delivery phases, and the associated recruitment activities are yet to get into full swing. This is borne out by Westpac’s advertising levels on their careers page, LinkedIn and Seek which are currently anaemic at best. Once it moves into the delivery phase, it would be impossible for a program of this scale not to impact the local market. And we would expect this should provide some relief for those in the project space.
WFH – The Candidates Strike Back!!!
Candidates have different priorities when choosing their next employer – contract or perm, industry, tech stack, location etc. Increasingly frequently we’re now seeing the number of WFH days sitting atop of many candidates’ priority list. It is driving decisions more so than many other factors and more so than 6 months ago. This is likely driven by the improvement in market conditions and the increasing bargaining power of some candidates.
There has been an accepted narrative that the slow move back to the office would continue and everyone would be swept along by this tide. However, it appears that in cities choked with congestion and unreliable trains, an increasing proportion of job seekers are digging their heels in.
We are seeing candidates being prepared to use WFH as a bargaining tool, including a candidate who declined a job offer and counter offered an employer with a lower salary if she could work from home more frequently. With the power in the market inching towards the candidate as demand increases, it appears that that the WFH will be a key factor in the battle for talent.
Balance Salary Snapshot – Winter/Spring 2025
Whether you’re planning your next career move, benchmarking compensation within your organisation or planning to recruit a key position, our Winter/Spring 2025 Salary Snapshot provides up to date data to inform your decisions. We have distilled thousands of discussions with candidates into a single page reference guide that is regarded as a source of truth by employers and candidates alike.
Click to see Balance’s Salary Snapshot for Winter/Spring 2025.