IT salaries to be mostly flat for 2014: Robert Walters

Recruitment firm expects strong demand to remain for IT professionals with specialised skills

Robert Walters expects 2014's IT salaries to grow by 2.3 per cent nationally, and by one per cent in NSW.

The outlook comes the way of the recruitment firm’s Salary Survey 2014, which found IT salaries will not experience a major shift this year.

Robert Walters NSW IT director, Peter Bateson, said the numbers are an average, so some positions may slightly increase and other may decrease compared to the trend.

“Professions with UI/UX [user interface/experience], Cloud, dev ops, Agile, ecommerce skills will demand a high premium, as there’s not enough people with this kind of experience because they are newer technologies,” he said.

Salaries for UI/UX in NSW are forecasted to increase by 4.16 per cent, mobile applications by five per cent, and developers by 9.6 per cent.

Bateson said the latter is predominantly a rise for demand from the junior developer market, as much as the senior one.

“Good junior to mid level developers are being sought after, those who can communicate with the business and be put into a career path within the company,” he said.

“Companies are looking to hold onto these people, as there’s not enough IT graduates coming out of university as in previous years, so companies are looking to take these graduates and mid level developers and keep them on-board.”

Speedy recruitment

When it comes to recruitment at companies, Bateson recommends applications are processed quicker to secure stronger candidates.

“A misconception amongst higher managers that there’s lot of IT candidates available,” he said.

“There are, and there are also lots of jobs available, but the problem is the available candidates are not always suitable for the available jobs.”

While finding a candidate may be easy, Bateson said they may be the ones with the generic skill sets and potentially unsuitable for the roles that require niche specialisation

“When the companies go to market, they need to move quickly to secure these candidates, because they will also be highly coveted by other companies in the space,” he said.

Recovering marketplace

Robert Walters is expecting growing confidence in the global market in 2014, and Bateson said this extends to the Australian market off the back of last year’s election.

Bateson admits that confidence was expected to bounce back sooner, though companies have only started to implement new project recently as they were “waiting for things to settle down.”

The compliance space was strong in 2013 and it will likely continue to be so as companies need to comply with rules.

“Candidates with strong business skills and can communicate with the business are required, which may have not been the case ten or 15 years ago,” Bateson said.

Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.

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