Hiring activity across South Africa’s IT sector has dropped from being the sector with most in-demand skills, to third position – after the business management and finance sectors, respectively.
This is according to the latest employment insights, CareerJunction’s Job Tracker 2024, which provides an analysis of the supply and demand trends in the online job market, from data gathered from Saongroup South Africa, which works with over 5 000 of SA’s top recruiters.
According to the report, there was an overall -6% decrease in recruitment activity in SA, from November to December 2023.
The following sectors took the biggest knock: legal (-25%) sales (-8%), marketing (-4%), building & construction (-3%) and the IT industry (-3%).
Large tech job cuts in the IT sector across the world in 2022 and 2023 led to a decrease in labour demand for South African IT employees, it says.
As a result, the most in-demand job sectors list shows demand for IT roles dropped from first ranking in 2021 to third ranking in 2023.
In 2023, the IT sector was superseded by demand for business and management professionals and finance professionals – with demand for software developers witnessing the biggest decline in the IT sector.
“Software development jobs have seen the biggest decrease in labour demand since 2019. Other IT job roles which are far less in-demand than they were four years ago are project administration / management, business analysis and database design / development / administration. Interestingly, although demand for IT roles has decreased, demand for roles in systems / network administration has grown consistently over the past few years,” according to the report.
Software developers have been one of the most in-demand professions globally over the last decade.
Although demand for IT professionals including software developers decreased over the last three years, software development skills remain sought after in the South African job market, as it continues to grapple a significant shortage of a variety of tech skills, notes the report.
The ongoing slowdown in the tech industry comes as organisations in the sector announced large-scale job cuts from the last quarter of 2022. These include the likes of multinationals Amazon, Google, Meta, Google parent company Alphabet, Salesforce, X (formerly Twitter), Spotify and Cisco.
According to layoff-tracking website, Layoffs.fyi, so far this year, 91 tech companies have already retrenched almost 24 600 employees across the globe. These companies include Microsoft, Google, TikTok, YouTube and Uber Freight.
Many of these tech companies benefitted from increased demand for their services during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but as customer behaviour returned to pre-pandemic times, some have seen declining demand for services and dropping share prices.
Despite this, the CareerJunction report points out thousands of job opportunities are expected to remain advertised in 2024 across business and management; finance; IT; sales and Admin; as well as office and support.
IT roles expected to remain in demand this year include: systems / network administrators/ data analysis / data warehousing professionals/ business analysts.
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