Firms dangle double-digit pay hikes for tech talent

Singapore

SINGAPORE tech talents - including those in non-technology industries - continue to see high demand despite a slowing global economy and companies switching their hiring to a lower gear.

A check with a number of recruiters showed that businesses are not only hiring for current tech roles, but creating new ones as well. This despite the likes of Uber, Bukalapak, WeWork and HP announcing job cuts around the world this year.

The deep skills-shortage in the tech sector continues to be a major challenge for Singapore businesses.

"The rate at which Singaporean businesses have embraced digital transformation has positioned them as digital leaders on a global scale, however, they risk losing this competitive edge and inhibiting their rate of digitisation progress if the tech talent crunch cannot be addressed," said Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard, managing director at specialist recruitment consultancy Robert Half Singapore.

Shinjika Shukla, associate director, Michael Page Singapore, said it was a particular challenge for emerging technologies like fintech. Of those surveyed in the recruitment firm's recent report, 64 per cent of fintech employers said they are struggling with recruitment while 94 per cent said Singapore is in need of fintech talent.

According to a recent Michael Page salary benchmark report, financial services and fintech professionals can expect a 10 to 15 per cent pay rise when switching jobs in the industry, with software developer being one of the more popular roles.

Beyond the overall increase in fintech hiring, Ms Shukla said new roles were still being created in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. This has made up for a significant decline in the number of roles opening up for weakening sectors like manufacturing.

Roles that require specialised capabilities such as developers, software engineers and IT security analysts continue to see skill gaps and are still part of companies' hiring plans, said Mr Imbert-Bouchard.

In the tech, media and telecommunications category, Michael Page reported a 12 to 15 per cent salary increase when switching jobs with roles such as IT project manager and software engineer in high demand.

Listings on Glassdoor showed salaries ranging between S$84,000 and S$120,000 a year for IT project managers with four to eight years of experience.

As for software engineers, a recent listing at Facebook required more than five years' experience for full stack web application development, with Glassdoor's salary estimate for that post being S$81,000 to S$88,000 a year.

Speaking with The Business Times, Lim Teck Yong, regional head of operations and head of people team at online shopping platform Shopee, said recruiting tech talents like data scientists, data analysts and software engineers has become more challenging as South-east Asia becomes a hotspot for many e-commerce businesses and startup ventures.

Over the past four years, Shopee has built up a robust data science team while its engineering team has added specialty roles such as machine learning engineers, data engineers and site-reliability engineers.

Its business teams have also taken up the tech torch, adopting data analytics to increase productivity. This involves coding scripts in marketing, operations and human resource analytics.

India software giant Tata Consultancy Services said it is actively hiring in the Asia-Pacific market across countries and it is not impacted by the economic slowdown. However, the number of positions for niche skills is on the rise where there is a gap between available pool and open requirements, said Dwen Hwee, head, human resources - Singapore & South Korea, Tata Consultancy Services.

There is also a growing demand for full stack developers, as candidates for such positions need to be well-versed in different types of databases, servers and IT systems. Full stack developers are sought after due to their diverse coding skills, which make them flexible and adaptable. Ms Hwee said salary expectations of individuals with the right qualifications and skill sets are increasing across the board.

According to the Info-communications Media Development Authority's (IMDA) 2018 annual survey for infocomm media manpower, enterprise is projecting a strong demand for 28,500 infocomm professionals over three years from 2018 to 2020.

IMDA said the government works closely with the industry, academia and trade associations to support workers in tech upskilling and reskilling through the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative. Since 2016, over 81,000 training places have been committed or taken up, it added.

Robert Half's Mr Imbert-Bouchard said government programmes like TeSA should help to bridge the talent gap by providing clear professional and skills development opportunities for new and existing technically skilled workers.