Singapore
Skill Shortage Information Technology Growth in Singapore. New research by global talent services company Morgan McKinley, as part of its 2024 Salary Guide. The report has revealed that recruitment in the technology sector across Singapore has become increasingly competitive. According to the guide, 76% of technology hiring managers found recruitment “very” or “quite” competitive in 2023.
The report highlights several key challenges for 2024. with 25% of hiring managers citing a shortage of skilled candidates as the primary obstacle. Additionally, 22% reported difficulties in competing on pay and benefits. While 19% pointed to a lack of approval for new headcount as a significant hurdle.
Despite these challenges, the outlook for 2024 appears brighter. Half of the technology hiring managers plan to increase headcount in the first half of the year. Meanwhile, 46% of technology workers are actively seeking new roles during this period, with an additional 31% considering a move.
When considering a job change, technology workers prioritize a higher salary (40%), followed by career growth and development opportunities (14%), and the ability to work fully remote (13%).
Flexibility continues to be crucial in the technology industry. Remote work and flexible working hours ranked first and third, respectively, among the top five benefits valued by tech professionals, alongside bonuses (second) and health insurance (fourth). Notably, 71% of technology professionals ranked ‘work from home’ in their top five valued benefits, the highest proportion among all specializations surveyed.
Moreover, 42% of technology professionals prefer to be in the office only 1-2 days a week, while just 8% want to be on-site five days a week. Over half (53%) are willing to forgo a pay rise in exchange for the desired flexibility.
In response to the skill shortages, 69% of employers plan to increase salary offers for certain hard-to-fill roles, with an additional 20% planning salary increases for all tech teams.
Gurj Sandhu, Managing Director of Morgan McKinley Singapore, commented on the situation:
“Global layoffs by tech giants, rising inflation, and general economic uncertainty all heaped pressure on the heavily invested-in Tech sector throughout 2023. But there is now definitely a silver lining. Hiring activity picked up in Q3 and paints a positive picture for 2024. Many businesses have projects pipelined and a strong book of work and will need the right talent to successfully see them through 2024 and beyond.”
He added, “It is likely that businesses are going to be more focused on salary corrections for their employees to hedge against inflation in an attempt to keep their existing headcount stable. This said, in-demand roles will always be able to attain higher salaries.”
Key jobs and skills in demand for 2024 in Singapore across areas of Technology include:
Development & Testing
- Jobs: Development Manager, Full Stack Engineer, Automation Testing, Engineering SME, L3 Developer
- Skills: Java with microservices & GCP, API Development, DotNet Core with Azure, CI/CD pipeline development, Python Development
Infrastructure
- Jobs: Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Network Engineer, Solution Architect
- Skills: Cloud Automation, Container Architecture, Site Reliability, Cloud Architecture, Kubernetes Deployments
Architecture
- Jobs: Solution Architect, Enterprise Architect, Principal Architect, Presales Solution Architect
- Skills: Coding experience, Implement microservices for SOA Architecture
Analytics
- Jobs: Big Data Engineers (Cloud), Data Scientist, Data/AI Governance (AI Ethics), Data Analyst, Machine Learning Engineer
- Skills: Spark/Kafka/Hadoop, LLM & NLP, Governance framework, Python, SQL, TensorFlow, PyTorch
Cyber Security & Technology Governance
- Jobs: Cyber Security Ops & Engineering, Technology Risk Management, Technology Audit, Cloud Security, Security Architect
- Skills: Technology Risk & Governance, Security Architecture, Cloud/DevSecOps, Threat & Monitoring, Cyber Security Data Analytics
The Morgan McKinley 2024 Salary Guide provides up-to-date and accurate salary data for a wide range of technology roles across Singapore. It offers hiring managers industry benchmarks for determining employee pay and giving professionals more visibility into their earning potential.
The research, which surveyed 650 businesses and 3,400 professionals. It examined companies’ hiring intentions for 2024, key motivators for job changes, and salary movement expectations.
