We have seen a high demand for resources across the project management and business analysis space in Q1 of 2017, up 18% from the same period in 2016.
Business Transformation is still the key buzz word. Over the past 10 years, most of the banking organisations have undertaken large-scale core platform replacement projects and these continue to roll out into various Commercial organisations and Government bodies. We are also seeing many of the senior resources, who have successfully delivered these projects in banking, moving industry and taking on senior positions within government organisations.
The threat of losing funding across the higher education sector and the desire to commercialise the working practices within other government bodies, such as Transport, has created a raft of modernisation programs in order to revolutionise the way these organisations operate. The key trend is to consolidate systems, tools and technologies onto a single technical operating platform to create efficiencies at an enterprise level. This is what has led to the increase in demand for senior level resources, Project & Programme Managers (PM), Business Analysts (BA), Data Analysts and Integration specialists so far this year.
Within the financial services industries much of the demand is driven by new legal and regulatory demands from APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority). We saw an increase in demand for project resources such as PM and BA at the start of the year. However, many of these requirements were subsequently put on hold due to a high degree of uncertainty surrounding the reporting requirements and, therefore, the number of additional resources required.
Disruption continues to be the driving force shaking up the smallest to largest of Enterprises. Innovative technology such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality, Machine Learning (ML) and blockchains are at the forefront of colossal change and will undoubtedly have an impact on hiring trends and even the types of roles that are recruited.
AI and ML have given rise to a new class of intelligent applications including robots, chat box and autonomous vehicles. Our human landscape is set to be changed forever and there is much debate as to the positive and negative implications for “life as we know it”. The advances in this industry are calling for a huge rise in Big Data and Data science candidates and increasing skills across Python, Hadoop, Splunk and Greenplumb technologies, alongside more traditional analytics platforms such as SAS and SQL which are still in high demand.
The top three trends across Digital Marketing are within content marketing, Big Data and Marketing Automation. It's no surprise that this vertical is jumping on board with the wider technology trends driving business change and growth.
Forbes stated that there were over a million unfilled CyberSecurity roles in 2016. This industry is expected to grow from $75 billion in 2016 to $170 billion in the next couple of years, with cybercrime predicted to cost businesses over $2.1 trillion globally by 2019 according to a recent report from Cisco. Most companies are still significantly under protected and whilst more and more money is being invested into technology, most organisations do not have the skills or knowledge to maximise the return on these investments.
There is set to be a rise in MSPs (Master Service Providers) in 2017, as organisations more frequently opt to outsource the management of their cyber security to a specialist or build up an entire practice internally to create centres of excellence to address these challenges. Therefore, the cyber security skill set will be in significant demand in the coming years as demand far outweighs supply, and the ability to identify, engage with, source and provide these resources is likely to create strong partnerships between enterprises and the most skilled of recruiters in this market.
DevOps is no longer an emerging phenomenon and IT organisations' management and development groups must adapt and move into a DevOps mindset. Automation and deployment tools are king in this area such as Octopus, Puppet, Ansible, Salt and Chef skills are in high demand as experience with cloud platforms such a AWS, Docker and Azure.
UX and UI Design roles are becoming increasingly defined and separated and more companies are realising they are two roles in their own rights. This will lead to specialists for each discipline, which will drive an even higher demand in 2017 for an increased competitive advantage for talent.
JavaScript development skills are at an all-time high in terms of demand. Out of the multiple framework options, we have seen a constant battle of popularity between Angular and React.js. Traditional enterprise sites seem to favour the popularity of Angular/2 and this doesn’t seem like it will shift anytime soon. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they adopt Angular 4, having noticed sites that are rolling out projects with Angular 2. With only pockets of financial institutions looking to experiment with React.js, it has been much more popular with digital agencies, start-ups & media.
With the popularity of Node.js ever-increasing we are seeing more organisations adopt this technology as its server side programming and moving away from traditional ASP.net/Java environments. As early adopters in media, finance and various start-ups adopt this strategy, there has been significantly increased demand for Node.js software engineers. Node.js is increasing in popularity within financial services and any industry that has a heavy reliance on data with its advanced capabilities as a data visualisation tool.
In addition to the above, Melbourne is experiencing a huge drive in and around Data and DigitalTransformation, with a particular emphasis on customer experience. Many of our key clients have further increased their focus on customer experience and are hiring specific Chief Customer Officers as a result. Whilst these are not technical roles, they rely heavily on the data and information the technical teams collect. Because of this increased emphasis, digital teams charged with developing more targeted and tailored customer campaigns and designing the platforms to improve the customer experience are also experiencing a significant increase in demand; particularly in the energy, retail banking and insurance sectors.
Creating and maintaining a gender balanced workforce is a leading factor in most of our client’s recruitment strategies for 2017. The market has recently seen a number of key appointments in the executive space and in particular in the abovementioned areas at ANZ with Maile Carnegie from Google as Chief Digital Officer and Emma Gray from Woolworths as their Chief Data Officer. Whilst this is a strong message to the market, we are some way off really addressing a very apparent imbalance. Ambition’s gender diversity team works very closely with our technology divisions to better partner our clients who are striving to achieve greater gender equality in the workplace.
