Meet the workers who got a $50,000 raise

Businesses typically rely on skilled migrants to fill up to half of the jobs available in the sector, but the COVID-19 shutdown has shut it down – ICT temporary work visas fell 50 percent last year compared to pre-pandemic levels – and the global race for tech talent is sending paychecks to sky.

“We failed to keep up with demand,” says new ACS CEO Chris Vein Australian Financial Overview.

“The domestic pipeline is not pumping enough technological talent. We need more than 60,000 new technology workers every year to meet the demand, but we only produce 10,000 technology graduates and postgraduates every year.

“In theory, we would try to fill that gap 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.”

ACS revealed that the federal government is struggling to find anything close to the 1900 cyber experts they need to support the new $10 billion Project REDSPICE program to double the size of the country’s leading cyber security agency and help Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries like Russia and China. .

ACS said a short-term push for skilled migration could help but was unlikely to fix the problem as Australian businesses struggle to outperform competing nations for technology talent.

Deloitte Access Economics’ Pulse Digital report found wages for tech workers grew 10.4 percent between 2019 and 2022, outperforming 6.9 percent wage growth for non-ICT jobs.

ACS says senior .NET/Java developers in Sydney, for example, can expect to earn between $120,000 and $170,000 a year before retiring, according to a recent Hayes Recruitment survey. It jumped by 28 percent over the previous year.

A technology network administrator in Melbourne can average around $130,000 a year, a 34 percent jump.

Despite gaping wage gains, Australian technology wages are still struggling to compete globally. Melbourne is 21st and Sydney 35th out of 100 cities worldwide in terms of relative salaries, according to the global talent index Local Talent Index.

Mr Piyasena, a former engineer who completed a master’s in data science, was recruited to join Queensland University of Technology as a senior data analyst earlier this year.

Sri Lankans came to Australia in 2017 and are permanent residents on the way to becoming citizens.

“Demand is always there but with COVID-19 restrictions and people returning to their home countries, it’s only growing,” he said.

The ACS said the Prime Minister’s employment summit will be key to helping other workers retrain and upskill into the technology sector, as well as bringing more women – female technology workers have increased 1.86 percentage points last year to 31 percent – ​​and expanding the technology pipeline. local through the education sector.

ACS said it supported Industry Minister Ed Husic’s comments about getting the Australian diaspora back as a way to improve the nation’s digital literacy.

ACS has also called for a $100 million program to increase support for IT educators to provide more resources for school teachers to improve students’ digital literacy and raise awareness of technology career paths.

And ACS has also proposed a business tax credit of up to $10,000 per employee for vocational technology training.

The board is also increasingly considering using employee share schemes to encourage workers to invest in long-term business success, to avoid an arms race on wages.

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