Major projects in the financial services sector and increased appetite for telecommunications hardware have continued to buoy employment confidence in the IT sector, according to the latest job index from recruiting firm, Hudson.
Based on 4211 employers from 19 industry groups, the Hudson Report detailed employment and HR trends across Australia for the month of June.
While employer sentiment is up 3.4 per cent for the third quarter of 2010 across all industries, the IT sector was largely stable, with a 0.2 per cent more employers intending to increase permanent staff levels other the previous quarter.
Telecommunications saw one of the largest increases nationally, with 31.3 per cent of employers in the sector planning to hire more staff over the next three months; 21.3 per cent over the last quarter.
“There have been major IT hiring announcements by a range of large organisations in the financial services sector,” Hudson ICT national practice director, Martin Retschko, said in a statement.
“This is either in response to projects that were put on hold due to the global financial crisis and are now being brought back online, or major drives in technology enhancement as a result of mergers.”
Victoria saw one of the few declines in IT employer sentiment across Australia, with a 14.5 per cent drop over the first quarter of 2010. The report has attributed this to the finalisation of high employment in the sector over previous months, though the creation of the new Network Operations Centre for the National Broadband Network (NBN) provides the opportunity to create between 425 and 700 new IT jobs once it is fully operational.
Queensland saw an increase in hiring intentions amongst IT employments of 10.6 per cent, in both the public and private sectors. The increase has been attributed to project restarts in the public sector, despite the recent payroll bungle at Queensland Health which held IBM, SAP and whole-of-government services contractor, CorpTech, accountable. The debacle has seen the government abandon its shared services model and launched a review into whole-of-government practices, which could refresh existing contracts, or open new contracts to businesses.
Results from the Hudson job index largely concur with the latest Advantage Jobs index, which also indicated that the IT sector had “flat lined” rather than grown in the past month.