“The need to update digital services is creating high staffing demand for automation test analysts as well as test analysts who are experienced within the digital/mobile area,” Jason Walker, managing director, Hays New Zealand, says in a statement.,
“With a number of companies investing in new projects, most employers are focused on securing permanent candidates.
Automation skills are a must, and ideally candidates should have the ability to set up automation frameworks. Web/mobile and online project experience is also preferred, and the top candidates have multi industry experience,” he says.
Another major driver of IT vacancy activity is growth in the data analytic and data science space.
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“Companies are investing in data warehousing to ensure all existing data is in readable formats so that data scientists can extract and provide meaningful insights. We will see a number of data scientist/analyst vacancies this quarter as a result,” says Walker.
Both soft skills and technical skills are required for these roles as communication is key to the successful delivery of meaningful insights.
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He says a number of overseas interviews are taking place for the role of data scientist, as this skill set is “quite rare” in New Zealand.
"Both soft skills and technical skills are required for these roles as communication is key to the successful delivery of meaningful insights. Therefore we’re seeing high demand for professionals with not only strong communication skills but skills in SAS, R, SPSS, SQL and Matlab.”
He says demand remains strong for information architects who have technical and functional skills across the business intelligence sphere.
Other sought after roles are developers, business analysts and help desk staff.
Read more: The most in-demand IT skill? Developers with good communication skills
The shortage around data science and analytics skill sets also came out in the results of this year’s State of the CIO report.
Globally, big data came out as the most difficult skill set to acquire (39 per cent), but this is only second in New Zealand (29 per cent).The 14th State of the CIO survey covered 558 top IT executives across the globe, including 51 from New Zealand.
The New Zealand respondents said application development/programming will be the most difficult skill set to find. The local respondents also cited challenges in finding staff for security/risk management and enterprise architecture.
Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz
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