The annual State of the Australian CIO Research reveals two important trends relevant to the IT recruitment community.

Firstly, it appears that IT departments’ love affair with outsourcing continues. The number of CIOs planning to outsource their in-house IT function has increased significantly. When asked the question – are you planning to outsource any significant IT function currently being managed in-house in 2010? A quarter of respondents replied yes, which is an increase from 18% in 2008. There is no change in the number of CIOs who are planning to bring a previously outsourced function in-house.  Read more...

The second annual Information & Communications Statistical Compendium released by the ACS (Australian Computer Society) reveals interesting new data on the behaviour and status of the ICT workforce.

Two things stood out. Female representation in the workforce is surprisingly high.  23.5% of all ICT trade, technical and professional jobs are performed by women. In some areas like graphics and web design, 50% of the workforce are women. Almost 60% of ICT trainers are women.  Read more...

We have written in length about the disparity between male and female executives in workplaces across Australia (here, here and here).

EOWA (Equal Opportunity for Women Agency) released new data on the status of female executives in workplaces across Australia, specifically senior executives within the ASX 200. It’s not pretty.

Women continues to be denied top jobs. Only 8.4 % of board positions and key Management positions are held by women. And there are only six women leading the top 200 Australian companies. We are also behind other developed nations in terms of female representation in the workforce.  Read more...

Monash University & Entity Solutions joined forces to produce the second IPro Index, a survey report investigating the behaviour of contractors in Australia.  IPro, coined by Entity Solutions, is short for ‘Independent Professionals’ (A magnet for Apple’s legal team?) and is used to refer mainly white collar contractors.

With 372 participants the sample size is not particularly large, but the survey served up some interesting questions and results.  Read more...

An estimated 400,000 to 2 million Australians experience bullying at work and it costs businesses an estimated $3 billion per year. We asked Harriet Stacey from Wise Workplace Investigations if potential bullies can be identified early in the recruitment process.

Recognised as an international problem, bullying has a major cost for Australian employers. Measurable costs such as those incurred from law suites and payouts and hidden cost from absenteeism, sick leave and high staff turnover. It is estimated that bullying by employees costs Australian business an estimated $3 billion per year .  Read more...

The latest Business Characteristics Survey (BCS) conducted by the ABS shed interesting light on what skills are critical to businesses, and short in supply.

Survey participants were asked to list the type of skills used in undertaking core business activities (businesses can identify more than one type of skills). Trades (27%) and financial (26%) skills were most widely used, while scientific and research (4.6%) skills was used the least by businesses.  Read more...

Will job seekers ever shell out money to gain access to job related content? Lisa Watts CEO of ArtsHub, a fee-based membership portal for artists, contemplates a future where job seekers paying to access job content could be the norm rather than the exception.   Read more...

Worth $19 billion and employing 289,000 people, the digital industry – which comprise of software, website, animation, video, computer games – contributes 3% of the nation’s GDP. In NSW alone there are 36,192 creative digital businesses operating. Without doubt, given our love affair with anything digital, the industry is growing fast.

A new research by Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) claims that skills shortage is acute in the digital industry and it is fuelling a $2 billion trade deficit. A survey of employers carried out early in the year found a disconnect between graduates and the skills required by employers.  Read more...

To say Australians love social media is an understatement of the highest order; we lead the world in social media usage.

There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that job seekers are using social media to look for employment opportunities and in some instances actually land a new job. In fact, a growing number of career advisors are encouraging the use of social media. In addition, the idea of using social media to promote one’s ‘personal brand’ is increasingly becoming popular. But, are Australians using social media to find jobs? If so, how widespread is the practice?  Read more...

Every year 18% of the Australian workforce started work with a new employer. New data released by the ABS reconfirmed that we are a nation of job hoppers. Almost one in six or 1,972,300 of the workforce has been with a company/business for less than 12 months.

Here’s how the distribution looks:

Employment tenure is even lesser with high-income earners. Our survey revealed that executives on average worked for almost eight employers during their lifetime; and the vast majority (25%) have worked for their current employer for less than a year.  Read more...

Personal branding in its simplest form is the application of marketing principles and tactics to promote an individual as a ‘brand’, with the expectation of gaining visibility, recognition and better career prospects. Since Tom Peters coined the phrase ‘brand you’ in the late nineties, the concept of self-promotion has taken off significantly. Today, it’s hard not to encounter material on personal branding; a Google search alone returned thousands of links on the topic.  Read more...

A new report by Ipsos suggested that employees are becoming more loyal. According to the study, the majority (55%) of the 1022 Australians surveyed last month indicated they would remain loyal even if they get offered a higher pay elsewhere.  A similar study by Kelly Services in March (sample size of 20,000) found that 44% percent of respondents are ‘totally committed’ to their current employer.  Read more...