What are the 12 most in-demand tech jobs? Photo: Shutterstock
The pace of technology is moving so fast that cybersecurity is no longer among the top 12 most in-demand careers going forward, executive search firm Hays has predicted as the industry digests the results of the federal government’s recent Jobs and Skills Summit.
The latest list of the most in-demand tech jobs of tomorrow is designed to help students and retrainees focus their careers on the areas of greatest demand. It spans the gamut from robotics and machine learning to user interface (UX) designers. .
Developers working in the chart-topping blockchain industry “will increasingly strive to ensure the security and integrity of data,” the company has forecast, citing demand, which is accelerating due to large corporate investments, the application of the technology to new use cases such as sustainability and NFTs, as well as retail cryptocurrency purchases.
Second on the list, UX designers are becoming increasingly valuable as companies continue to focus on fully digital customer interactions – which requires user interfaces that are effective, rich, and customer-centric.
Some of the capabilities on the list relate to specific technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) – a demand for which “right now the future is dwarfed [supply]’ noted Hays — and robotics, which is gaining even more momentum as companies address labor shortages and rising costs by deploying collaborative robots (or “cobots”) that work side-by-side with human workers.
Software engineers, a perennial and high-demand category, ranked fourth, while cloud engineers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and mobile application developers are expected to remain in high demand for the foreseeable future.
Demand will be particularly pronounced in Australia, where many companies remain laggards in areas like analytics and AI, and CIOs are increasing their investment in skills to remain competitive.
What happened to Cyber?
But despite cybersecurity’s longstanding primacy — and recent steps to better fill the skills gap by updating the government’s ANZSCO classification system — their omission from the list reflects how rapidly demand for the dozen of listed skills has grown in an era of the increase has increased digital transformation.
Although cybersecurity practices are inevitably part of many other domains, traditional incident response, security monitoring, and forensics tasks – as now described in ANZSCO – have been ignored in favor of DevSecOps and AppSec.
These two very specific security functions relate to the practice of “shifting left” – incorporating security best practices into software development processes from the beginning of the process and ensuring that development, security, and operations engineers work in lockstep to maintain security.
“In an ever-evolving world of work, IT professionals need to keep up,” said Robert Beckley, Hays’ regional director, when the list was announced.
“As you plan your IT career path, keeping track of the skills employers will need in the years to come will help shape your upskilling plan and future-proof your employability.”
Summit identifies peak demand
The list comes as the federal government’s Jobs and Skills Summit deflated discussion about the importance of progressive policies to address long-standing skills gaps that are increasing the operational burden on a range of companies in and outside of IT.
And while the IT sector was not specifically called for support in the official list of summit outcomes, many of the 36 immediate actions it produced will positively impact the IT skills pipeline in other ways.
These include measures such as 1,000 digital apprenticeships in the Australian civil service; Acceleration of qualified visa processing; an increase in the permanent migration program to 195,000 places; and two-year visa extensions for graduate students working in areas with proven skills shortages.
The government will also accelerate the provision of 465,000 additional TAFE toll-free places; Improving women’s labor market participation by strengthening programs such as the Australian Skills Guarantee that receive digital skills targets; Align the framework for micro-entitlements with the requirements of the labor market; and partner with the Tech Council of Australia to develop a free national virtual work experience program to raise awareness of tech careers.
Also in the pipeline is a new Digital and Tech Skills Compact between companies and unions that will implement digital apprenticeships designed to help workers make money while learning tech skills – an approach recently shared with Cyber Academy -Program introduced by industry and university.
The breadth of the productive discussions “really exceeded even our most optimistic expectations of what we could advance together,” said Federal Treasurer Dr. Jim Chalmers concluded the summit and admitted that the event’s planners originally thought it would be a “great” outcome to have a dozen outcomes.
The summit, Chalmers said, reflects “a real hunger for real conversations about our economic challenges and a real appetite to see what we can achieve when we work together.”