At long last salaries in Western Australia’s information technology sector are increasing, as is the number of jobs.
Latest job figures indicate that, on the back of an industry turnaround, IT professionals in WA are attracting higher salaries and have more jobs to choose from.
The latest Olivier Internet Job Index indicates an 80.2 per cent increase in the number of job vacancies in the past 12 months.
In WA, IT salaries overall have increased by up to 6.5 per cent in the past six months, according to the Ambit IT&T Salary Index figures.
While it is still early days and the salary increases remain confined to particular areas, the news augurs well for WA’s IT industry, which has lagged behind national IT jobs growth.
In WA, programming manager salaries have increased an average of 21.7 per cent, while security specialist salaries have risen by up to 32 per cent.
Enterprise resource planning roles have enjoyed substantial across-the-board increases in the past 12 months –an average of 15.2 per cent – while salaries for Microsoft .Net, C++ and Java/J2EE programmers have risen by 7.6 per cent.
However, web developers and producers will continue to struggle to find work due to a continued decline in available job opportunities.
Sales and marketing roles have remained static in WA, although this is not the case in Sydney and Melbourne.
In fact, sales and marketing salaries in Sydney and Melbourne are on the rise, where many IT companies are based.
This adds credence to the theory that the ICT sector believes business is ready to spend as sales teams are mobilised to target potentially cashed-up clients.
Ambit Recruitment Group State manager Hadyn Bell said the resources boom had had a flow-on effect to other sectors in WA, with both salaries and job numbers increasing dramatically in the past six months.
“All round, I think the market is turning,” Mr Bell said.
“Melbourne and Sydney have been turning for the last 12 to 18 months, and we are catching up.
“We’ve fielded 20 requirements this week and that is to the extent that we are getting calls from the client.
“Six months ago the client wouldn’t have called us. It’s been a long time coming and we were starting to lose staff in WA to the east.
“Candidates are now getting two to three job offers as opposed to none previously. That’s also one of the things that is pushing the rates up.
“What we are seeing is greater market equalisation in WA.”
The upward trend in salaries indicates renewed confidence in the ICT industry, and businesses’ willingness to spend on upgrading their existing systems.
The news is also good for IT graduates, with the number of available positions increasing after several years of a flat market.
These job figures represent an emerging trend, with other surveys, such as the Australian Computer Society’s 2003 ICT Employment survey released earlier this year, showing that full-time employment is on the rise.
The ACS survey showed that unemployment in the ICT sector was falling at more than double the rate of the overall labour market.
But this was tempered by the fact that the overall rate of unemployment in IT remains extremely high compared with the national unemployment figure of 5.7 per cent.
