Business has typically relied on skilled migrants to fill up to half of the available jobs in the sector, but COVID-19 shutdowns have turned that tap off – ICT temporary work visas fell by 50 per cent last year compared to pre-pandemic levels – and a global race for tech talent is sending salaries skyward.
“We are falling well short of meeting the demand,” the new ACS CEO Chris Vein told The Australian Financial Review.
“The domestic pipeline is just not pumping out enough tech talent. We need over 60,000 new technology workers a year to meet the demand but we are only producing 10,000 technology grads and post-grads each year.
“In theory, we would try to fill that shortfall with foreign talent, but we can’t and we may not be able to catch up for two, three or five years. Australia is competing with the US, Israel, every other country in the world for this talent.”
The ACS reveal the federal government is struggling to find anything close to the 1900 cyber experts they need to support it’s new $10 billion program Project REDSPICE to double the size of the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency and help Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China.
The ACS said a short-term boost to skilled migration could help but is unlikely to fix the problem because Australian businesses are struggling to outbid competing countries for tech talent.
The Deloitte Access Economics’ Digital Pulse report found wages for technology workers grew by 10.4 per cent between 2019 and 2022, outperforming 6.9 per cent wage growth for non-ICT occupations.
The ACS said that a senior .NET/Java developer in Sydney, for example, can expect a salary between $120,000 and $170,000 a year before superannuation, according the latest Hayes Recruitment survey. That’s a jump of up to 28 per cent over the previous year.
A tech network administrator in Melbourne can achieve an average of around $130,000 a year, a jump of 34 per cent.
Despite the jaw-dropping wage increases, Australia’s technology wages still struggle to compete globally. Melbourne is 21st and Sydney 35th out of 100 cities worldwide in terms of relative salaries, according to global talent index Local Talent Index.
Mr Piyasena, a former engineer who completed a masters in data science, was poached to join the Queensland University of Technology as a senior data analyst earlier this year.
The Sri Lankan came to Australia in 2017 and is a permanent resident on the path to becoming a citizen.
“The demand has always been there but with COVID-19 restrictions and people returning to their home countries, it has only grown,” he said.
The ACS said the Prime Minister’s job summit would be key to helping other workers reskill and upskill to the tech sector, as well as bringing in more women – female tech workers have increased 1.86 percentage points in the last year to 31 per cent – and expanding the local tech pipeline through the education sector.
The ACS said it supported Industry Minister Ed Husic’s comments about getting the Australian diaspora back as a way to boost the nation’s digital literacy.
The ACS has also been calling for a $100 million program to boost support for IT educators to provide school teachers with more resources to improve student digital literacy and increase the awareness of technology career pathways.
And the ACS has also proposed a business tax credit of up to $10,000 per employee for vocational technology training.
Boards are also increasingly considering the use of employee share schemes to encourage workers to invest in the long-term success of a business, to avoid an arms race on wages.
