Government demand for ICT talent

Government is expected to be among the strongest sectors for hiring information communications technology (ICT) skills next year, according to recruiters.

Hiring experts say project managers and business analysts will be sought to lead new projects and focus on process improvement and cost efficiency across state and federal government.

The public sector were were implementing iPads as a new tool to aid public sector staff fuelling demand for the appropriate skills, Hays IT regional director Peter Noblet says.

“Senior infrastructure project managers will also be needed as the Victorian government continues to centralise IT services,” he says.

Client engagement and account managers were also wanted to build strong partnerships between government departments and CenITex, the Victorian shared services agency.

Mr Noblet said business intelligence developers, in particular Microsoft and Oracle platforms, were also in demand in the public sector.

“(They are) needed due to the recognised need for BI to assist in management decision-making in addition to the large BI programs that are active across government.’’

He said both contracting and permanent hiring would be in favour next year.

“Some departments will continue to focus on securing staff in permanent roles and cutting the use of contractors,’’ he says. “Yet others still recognise the benefits of temporary assignments for project needs, and are also creating fixed-term contracts to resource projects.”

Spark Recruitment director Luke Singleton says government hiring would remain solid next year.

“We are observing a trend in the market around converting contractors to either permanent or fixed-term agreements to reduce cost,” he says. “Typically, contract markets such as the state and federal governments will have consistent demand, if not increased demand.”

Elsewhere, the resources and mining, oil and gas and engineering sectors were expected to see some of the strongest ICT hiring in 2012.

“We expect to see strong interest for architects SharePoint, business analysts, project manager, eDRM (electronic document and records management), storage and security roles, as well as network engineers to work remotely in the mining, oil and gas sectors,’’ Mr Noblet says.

He says the broad telecommunications sector was expected to be active again as well.

“Technical telecommunication skills and more and more the radio transmission side of things is pretty good.’’

Mr Noblet says there is a fair bit of work in the switching and routing space, but it was more in network upgrades and network optimisation.

Launch Recruitment managing director Rebecca Wallace says the adoption of smart metering and smart grid technologies had created more demand for technical expertise.

“The changes in the utilities industry is definitely creating demand for new roles that have not been around before,’’ she says. “There are a lot of roles in fibre at the moment – so fibre planners, architects and those roles weren’t around a few years ago.”