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08.05.09 IT contractors strike while money\'s hot
Lower immigration, fewer students enrolled in computer sciences, low unemployment, a stronger economy and lots of project work means recruitment firms have no trouble placing good IT candidates, if they can get them, for high salaries or contract fees.
\"The market is still candidate-short,\" says Nathan Pattison, manager of recruitment firm Verrosity.
\"Knowing the contract market is buoyant, a lot of permanents step out, so clients can\'t find permanent staff.
\"I\'m seeing contract developers getting 10 to 20 per cent more than they are worth. Intermediate contractors with only a few years\' experience are getting $50 to $70 an hour,\" he says.
Campbell Hepburn, national practice manager for Hudson IT&T, agrees that workers are going out contracting earlier in their career - even just a couple of years in.
\"It used to be that employers would expect their permanent people to have 75 per cent of the necessary skill set, and they would bring contractors in as experts to add value. Now the necessity is to fill seats, so the contractors don\'t need to have such a high-value skill set,\" Hepburn says.
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IT contractors strike while money\'s hot
Page 1 of 2 View as a single page 5:00AM Wednesday Oct 04, 2006
By Adam Gifford
Lower immigration, fewer students enrolled in computer sciences, low unemployment, a stronger economy and lots of project work means recruitment firms have no trouble placing good IT candidates, if they can get them, for high salaries or contract fees.
\"The market is still candidate-short,\" says Nathan Pattison, manager of recruitment firm Verrosity.
\"Knowing the contract market is buoyant, a lot of permanents step out, so clients can\'t find permanent staff.
\"I\'m seeing contract developers getting 10 to 20 per cent more than they are worth. Intermediate contractors with only a few years\' experience are getting $50 to $70 an hour,\" he says.
Campbell Hepburn, national practice manager for Hudson IT&T, agrees that workers are going out contracting earlier in their career - even just a couple of years in.
\"It used to be that employers would expect their permanent people to have 75 per cent of the necessary skill set, and they would bring contractors in as experts to add value. Now the necessity is to fill seats, so the contractors don\'t need to have such a high-value skill set,\" Hepburn says.
Advertisement\"We expect to see a tempering of hourly rates for contractors, apart from those with high-level skills.
\"If you look at the vendor sector in IT, the pressure is on globally to reduce costs, and they can\'t keep hiring contractors at high rates.\"
Hudson publishes regular overviews of the job market. It says 27.7 per cent of IT employers expect to increase contracting levels during this half-year, as do 24.5 per cent of telecommunications sector employers.
A whopping 69.7 per cent of IT employers want to increase permanent staffing levels, and only 5.3 per cent want to cut back.
\"What\'s driving the sector is increased spending on IT to increase workforce productivity and efficiency,\" says Hepburn.
\"We are seeing a lot happening across the government sector, and also changes in the telecommunications sector.\"
He says those changes will bring about a technology explosion.
The fact that more businesspeople now understand technology, even if they are not true technologists, means companies are willing to adopt more technology faster, driving demand for skilled staff.
\"In the engineering space we are seeing a lot of demand around Cisco, especially in the security space,\" says Hepburn. Cisco makes networking equipment, and in recent years has been one of the leading drivers toward voice-over-internet-protocol phone systems, which are increasingly replacing PABXs.
Hepburn says there is also a lot of pressure to find design engineers, project managers, senior business analysts, systems analysts and testers.
By Adam Gifford
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/employment/news/article.cfm?c_id=11&objectid=10404131
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05.08.10
