Where are the IT jobs?

Parka SG

From the computer times. Well......I must say that it's not bad. But considering the amount of people you're competing against to get a job, you have to give yourself an extra edge.

Where are the IT jobs?

By Hellen Tan
Oct 1, 2003

The infocomm industry employed 103,880 people in 2002 or 5.1 per cent of Singapore's labour force. What's available on the market?

Applications development, systems integration, technical support, and education and training are where IT job vacancies are, according to the annual survey on infocomm manpower for 2002. The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) released the results yesterday.

According to the survey, covering 2,274 organisations, of which 1,542 are end-user companies, the top five skills deemed important are in IT project management, operating systems knowledge, multimedia skills, database administration and networking. These skills are also the ones with the highest shortage in terms of number of infocomm manpower required.

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And if you are already an IT professional and are wondering what sort of skills you need to upgrade, learn intrusion detection and .NET applications development. These two skills see the greatest demand in both local and international infocomm market.

The National Infocomm Competency Centre (NICC), which helps to match IT jobs available to manpower training needs, said the IDA survey gels with its own findings in which the top five jobs that NICC lists at any one time are: Application developers, systems engineers, project managers, technical consultants and IT administrators.

And IT professionals looking for jobs are also in these categories, said NICC's general manager, Ms Lim Choon Heong. NICC also administers government-funded training, coming up with the training required by the industry.

The demand for infocomm manpower next year is just about 1,200 jobs more.

Mr Lo Yoong Khong, deputy director, IDA's manpower development, said: 'This survey validates the fact that our training programmes are focused on the right areas - emerging technologies.'

He added that the Infocomm Training and Attachment programme has been a useful tool in this respect, creating opportunities for about 300 infocomm professionals to train and gain hands-on experience.

The number of vacancies is projected to rise to more than 4,500 for 2003.

But IDA said that the 4,500 vacancies include companies' projections on retrenchments and resignations. After including expected levels of resignation and layoffs, the total number of infocomm manpower in 2003 is expected to grow by only 0.2 per cent, which means slightly more than 200 jobs based on 103,880 people, the total number of infocomm manpower employed in Singapore in 2002. The demand for infocomm manpower next year is expected to be 1.2 per cent more or just more than 1,240 jobs.

About half of the infocomm workforce is employed in the industry itself and the balance in end-user organisations, in which the financial sector is the biggest employer taking in over 32.5 per cent of the 51,000 professionals. Business services employed 24.8 per cent, wholesale and retail trade took 18 per cent while manufacturing and others made up the rest.

Employers' market now

According to the National Infocomm Competency Centre (NICC), there are four applicants for every IT job available. This has been the trend in the last one year, said Ms Lim Choon Heong, general manager of NICC.

This could explain why most organisations from both the infocomm industry itself and from end-user companies - 71.2 per cent - are unwilling to pay a premium for employing professionally certified infocomm manpower. This figure is from the IDA 2002 infocomm manpower survey.

NICC, which administers government-funded IT training, said not only are companies unwilling to pay a premium for such employees, they are also unwilling to fund the training. Many IT professionals are paying for themselves to get trained and certified.

Ms Lim also observed that the majority of infocomm professionals who obtained certification did not get pay increments from employers.

Ms Lim said: 'It's a short-term mentality because when the economy picks up, those who are trained will leave and there will be employers willing to pay the premium.'

So you want to be a security professional?

Get some real hands-on experience if you are thinking of getting a job as a security professional, said Mr You Cheng Hwee, director of consulting services of Maximus Consulting, a security services provider. The salary for someone with a year or more of experience is between $3,000 and $5,000.

While getting a certification in security is important, the real test lies in real-world experience. Not having this can pose a danger to a company that hires such a professional.

'It's like being able to recognise if someone who enters your house is just a passer-by or a thief,' said Mr You. In intrusion detection, the security professional needs to be able to recognise the signs (the programming codes) that the company's system is being intruded as there are also many false alarms, which could lead to a wild goose chase.