The changes in IT recruitment come amid a significant decline in global recruitment activity.
Employment activity across South Africa's IT sector has fallen from the sectors with the most in-demand skills to third place behind business administration and finance, respectively.
This is according to the latest employment insights, CareerJunction's Job Tracker 2024, which looks at supply and demand trends in the online job market from data collected from Saongroup South Africa, which works with over 5,000 of SA's top recruiters. is being analyzed.
According to the report, from November to December 2023, SA recruitment activity decreased by -6% overall.
The hardest hit sectors were legal (-25%), sales (-8%), marketing (-4%), architecture and construction (-3%), and the IT industry (-3%).
The report said large-scale technical layoffs in the IT sector across the world in 2022 and 2023 led to a decline in demand for IT workers in South Africa.
As a result, demand for IT jobs has dropped from number one in 2021 to number three in 2023, according to the list of most in-demand jobs.
In 2023, the demand for software developers witnessed the largest decline in the IT sector as the IT sector was replaced by the demand for business, administrative and financial professionals.
“Software development jobs have seen the largest decline in labor demand since 2019. Other IT occupations with significant declines in demand compared to four years ago include project management/administration, business analytics, and database jobs. design/development/management, etc. Interestingly, even as demand for IT roles has declined, demand for systems/network management roles has consistently increased over the past few years.” says the report.
The infographic shows sectors where demand for roles is increasing and which sectors are decreasing. (Image source: CareerJunction)
Software developer has been one of the most in-demand professions in the world for the past decade.
Although demand for IT professionals, including software developers, has declined over the past three years, the South African job market continues to face significant shortages in a variety of technical skills, with software development skills still in demand. The report points out.
The slowdown in the tech industry continues as organizations in the sector announce large-scale layoffs starting in the final quarter of 2022. These companies include multinationals such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Google's parent company Alphabet, Salesforce, and X (formerly Twitter). , Spotify, Cisco.
So far this year, 91 technology companies around the world have already cut about 24,600 employees, according to layoffs tracking website Layoffs.fyi. These companies include Microsoft, Google, TikTok, YouTube, and Uber Freight.
While many of these technology companies benefited from increased demand for their services during the COVID-19 lockdown, others saw demand for their services decline and their stock prices decline as customer behavior returned to pre-pandemic levels. be.
Nevertheless, the CareerJunction report notes that thousands of job openings are expected to continue to be posted across companies and executives in 2024. Finance; It; Sales and Management. So is the office and support.
IT roles expected to remain in demand this year include systems/network administrators/data analytics/data warehousing specialists/business analysts.