In Christchurch the infrastructure market is strong thanks to the rebuild while there is an extreme candidate shortage in development. With several big brands moving their offices or planning to do so, additional job opportunities will be created.However the shortage of skilled IT talent will remain a problem for employers, particularly when they look for candidates skilled in new technologies such as DevOps.

Wellington too is seeing high demand for DevOps Engineers, who are sought on a permanent basis. Local candidates are in particularly short supply.

In general there is a split between Cloud architecture and automation roles. The key skills in demand are AWS certification, CHEF, LINUX , PUPPET with a language coding proficiency in Ruby, Java or .Net development.

Business Intelligence Consultants and Datastage, Cognos and SSIS Developers have been in demand for a few months now, and this is expected to remain the case as the Government gains its new financial year budget.

In Auckland, more digital development vacancies are available in more organisations. We are seeing continued growth of mobile apps in order to increase customers and revenue.

Within the Microsoft technology contract market we are seeing more roles in areas

where skills are in particularly short supply, such as DevOps, .Net Technical Leads and Senior BI Consultants.

There is an increasing number of candidates on the Auckland market with technical skills in the development space who can’t find work – often these candidates are not used to collaborative methodologies like AGILE and SCRUM but more used to Waterfall-esque environments where they are given clear specifications and do not have to think any further than that.

We are also seeing employers unwilling to consider people without relevant soft skills.

Within the Microsoft technology market employers now commonly ask candidates to complete a technical test before meeting with them to ensure they are technically strong enough for the role.

Behavioural questioning is also increasingly being used to ensure a preferred candidate is a strong cultural fit for a company.

Employers continue to prefer candidates with local New Zealand experience, despite the increase in candidates earlier this year who were granted Skilled Migrant visas.

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Hotspots of demand

DevOps Engineers are in high demand. When the communication between testing, infrastructure and development is aligned, the time required to produce high quality code is reduced. This saves money and improves the company culture. However the skills sets in this area differ from organisation to organisation. The key development practices are automation and continuous integration. Demand has been increasing as organisations move their infrastructure from localised storage to cloud based servers. In Wellington for example, Open Source development is moving to be hosted on AWS cloud making and Microsoft environments are moving to Azure Cloud. This is driving demand.

Top level Senior, Principal and Technical Lead .Net Developers are in short supply.

Java Developers are also sought due to new product releases in conjunction with the normal cycle of Developers finding new opportunities.

Front-end Developers are also sought. Employers require keen candidates who are interested in pure front end development. Front end development is constantly changing so people need to keep up-skilling to be relevant.

Full stack Developers at the intermediate and senior level are another area of demand. Full stack Developers have a broad skill set since they can work in both the front and back end of most projects. This is often more desirable that having a pure front end developer and a pure backend developer.

Android Developers are needed too. The contract market is very lucrative with traditional in-house Android Developers able to increase their annual earnings substantially at a number of large banking organisations. Senior candidates moving into contract roles create opportunities for

intermediate level Developers to progress to the next stage in their career.

Native iOS/Android Developers are also sought, particularly mobile Developers with native experience.

TDD/Unit testing candidates are also sought by product houses that want to produce clean reusable code. This allows the code to be enhanced and maintained easily.

UI and UX Designers are needed too, especially those with expertise in the full Adobe Creative Suite.

We are also seeing demand for Business Intelligence Consultants. Teradata BI Consultants are in short supply and since senior consultants can contract for very high daily rates they are unlikely to consider a permanent role. As a result a number of key consultancies will consider candidates from overseas, especially South Africa and India.

Datastage, Cognos and SSIS Developers are also in demand and, as noted above, we expect this to continue thanks to new financial year budgets and the associated commencement of new projects in Wellington. As we look to the future R will become more appealing to employers as it is slowly establishing itself as a very powerful technology when paired with Microsoft Excel Datasheets.

Digital Business Analysts and Project Managers are also sought. There is rapid growth within the digital space as companies focus on their customer service and require experienced candidates to ensure that projects exceed expectations. There is a high demand for permanent candidates to replace contract resources. Soft skills are valued equally if not higher than technical skills and make the difference between candidates. E-commerce and Mobility candidates are also sought.

Candidate trends

Candidates moving from Auckland to Wellington often prefer packages that include a relocation bonus. Employers looking to secure such candidates should also highlight that they respect and understand family challenges.

Candidates are networking with each other via meetup.com events and the top candidates are active on Github in order to share their development projects with the wider community.

Finally, a number of candidates want to leave larger corporate environments in order to reduce their working week from 60 hours to 40.

“Behavioural questioning is also increasingly being used to ensure a strong cultural fit for a company”

CANDIDATE TRENDS Candidates are networking with each other via meetup.com events and the top candidates are active on Github.

To find an office near you visit: hays.net.nz/office-locator