Hays highlights hottest IT jobs

Are you Jenkins savvy or TeamCity smart? If so your skills are in high demand, according to recruitment specialist Hays.

Hays has just released its 2016 Salary Guide for New Zealand and Australia saying that, in New Zealand, test-driven development and continuous integration and deployment are now typical in the development space, including Microsoft development.

“Candidates with experience working with these methodologies are extremely rare,” Hays says. “A number of Microsoft houses require candidates with skills such as TeamCity and Jenkins but available talent is snapped up quickly.”

TeamCity is a commercial Java-based build management and continuous integration server developed by JetBrains. Jenkins is an open source tool written in Java that provides continuous integration services for software development. It was developed by Sun Microsystems in 2004 as the Hudson project, but a dispute arose with Oracle after Oracle acquired Sun and Hudson morphed into Jenkins.

Hays also said that it was seeing “a major shift to the more scalable and flexible platforms from leading software companies such as Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft.” As a result, “employers are more focused on retaining technical web developers and mobile developers who understand digital processes and the end-user experience, as well as possessing strong technical knowledge in development.”

Also tipped in the next 12 months is an increase in the use of digital tools such as big data and analytics to drive a deeper customer engagement. “Successful candidates must know how to use big data to identify trends, risks and opportunities and specific business actions,” Hays said. “The use of virtualisation, cloud technologies, open source data tools and applications that combine data sets to create value are also on the rise. Those with skills in these areas are able to command premium salaries.”

Digital Curriculum won’t deliver skills

Meanwhile three leading industry figures Ian McCrae, founder and chief executive Orion Health; Frances Valintine, founder and chairwoman The Mind Lab and Ian Taylor, founder and CEO Animation Research have written an open letter to education minister, Hekia Parata, warning that her just-announced plan to incorporate training in digital technology into the curriculum does not go far enough.

“Tech sector growth will continue to be hindered and we will become increasingly reliant on immigration for technical staff,” the letter says.

It argues: “We believe that the fundamental problems with this subject have not been addressed. Consequently, unless your ministry takes a bolder stance, our children will continue to be educationally disadvantaged and under-skilled for high-paying tech jobs.”