After an 8 per cent increase in tech jobs last year, the Tech Council of Australia says the country is on track to meet the Government’s goal.
The research flies in the face of tech layoffs, which have been rampant in 2023. In March, Australian software giant Atlassian axed 500 jobs citing changing company priorities, but global companies like Meta, Salesforce, Microsoft and Google have also let go of thousands of staff members.
But the TCA research shows that for every job lost over the past quarter in Australia, 20 more have been created.
As of February this year, the tech workforce reached 935,000, which is 78 per cent of the 2030 target Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed to in 2022. More than 10,500 jobs have been added to the workforce in the three months to March 2023, the majority of which have been directed to tech-intensive jobs in non-tech industries like retail, banking, professional services, government and mining.
The chief executive of the TCA, Kate Pounder, says the tech industry is now the country’s seventh-largest employing industry, with jobs in the industry growing faster than the average across every state and territory.
“The growth of tech jobs in non-traditional tech industries reflects a long-term structural change in the Australian economy and shows that digital skills are becoming deeply embedded into all facets of the economy,” Pounder says.
“This shows that skill-transferability and flexibility are some of the major benefits of being employed in the tech sector.”
The average wage for tech jobs also remains high at approximately $132,000 – in fact, jobs in the direct tech sector were the second-highest of any advertised on SEEK in the past 12 months, only just behind CEOs.
Pounder says to achieve the government’s 1.2 million job target, the government must continue to increase awareness of the tech jobs opportunity, fix gaps in education and training pathways, improve diversity in the industry and target skilled migration areas.
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