Tech companies may have laid off staff en masse as economic conditions turned last year, but the need for IT skills across the economy is still shown by data from workplace social media site LinkedIn.
Each year, the platform pulls together its list of the fastest growing job titles in Australia – and IT roles have once again dominated the field.
Despite huge layoffs at big tech companies, including LinkedIn’s parent company Microsoft which announced redundancies for 10,000 staff this week, data compiled from profiles on the jobs platform show the ongoing importance of tech skills for the workforce.
“There are a lot of jobs in tech that are showing themselves to be future proof, even pandemic proof,” Linkedin Career Expert Cayla Dengate told Information Age.
“This a list of jobs that have seen the strongest growth over a five-year period. That’s from before the pandemic hit, through recent difficult times, and they are still going strong today.
“While there’s an awareness that parts of the tech sector are feeling it at the moment, other areas are still seeing exponential growth.”
LinkedIn’s fastest growing tech jobs in 2023
- Technical program manager
- Site reliability engineer
- Platform engineer
- Machine learning engineer
- Cyber security analyst
- Data engineer
- Cloud engineer
- Service desk engineer
- Cyber security engineer
- Product designer
Across the board, the issue of the gender gap remains prominent in LinkedIn’s data with most of these roles having a 75 per cent male distribution.
According to ACS Australia’s Digital Pulse 2022, women make up an average of 31 per cent of the technology workforce – meaning jobs like service desk engineer (92 per cent male), cyber security engineer (87 per cent male) and cloud engineer (85 per cent male) have gender skews far beyond the industry average.
LinkedIn’s jobs growth data also shows the education levels of people currently in these fast-growing tech roles.
Master’s degrees are extremely common for machine learning engineers, nearly 84 per cent of whom have at least a master’s level education, while more than half of cloud, data, and cyber security engineers all have master’s or higher degrees.
Cyber security roles continue to be among the most needed around Australia and the world. In a recent report from recruiter Robert Half, cyber security specialists came in as the second-most in demand role for 2023 – behind DevOps engineers and just ahead of developers.
Yet despite the great demand for cyber security personnel, people are still finding it difficult to crack into the industry.
Dengate noted that the major data breaches of the last 12 months have highlighted the need for cyber security skills in the workforce.
“We’ve seen for more than two years running now that cyber security is an area that’s growing here in Australia,” she said.
“It’s not a ‘nice to have’ anymore – it’s an absolutely vital skillset for every organisation.”
