Big drop in IT hiring in South Africa
Hiring activity in the Information Technology (IT) sector has declined by 14% over the past three months, with no employment sectors seeing any significant growth over the period.
This is according to CareerJunction’s latest Employment Insights report. Hiring activity across all employment sectors declined by 3% between December 2022 and January 2023.
“Major drivers for this slowdown in recruitment activity are lower demand levels for IT, Sales and Business & Management as well as Admin, Office & Support staff,” Career Junction said.
The most significant slowdown was in the sales sector, in which hiring declined by 19%. Demand for Admin, Office, and support staff dropped significantly.
Hiring in the IT sector dropped by 14%, and Career Junction highlighted the specific skills that suffered the biggest drop in demand:
- Software development
- Business analysis
- Data analysis and warehousing
- Database design, development, and administration
- IT project administration and management
In its report, CareerJunction highlighted the growth in remote work opportunities in South Africa, with the IT industry sitting in the top spot for the most remote working vacancies.
“Before the pandemic, remote jobs were very scarce. In January 2020, only 0.3% of all jobs advertised were ‘work from home’ vacancies,” CareerJunction said.
“In January 2022, about 5% of all jobs advertised were ‘work from home’ vacancies. A year later, in January 2023, this percentage dropped to 3.4%.”
58% of remote working vacancies in South Africa lie in the IT sector, with the next highest being Business & Management at 15%.
Looking at the IT sector specifically, remote work vacancies increased from 0.4% to 10.4% between January 2020 and 2023.
“In January 2023, 10.4% of advertised IT jobs were remote work opportunities, compared to January 2020 when only 0.4% of advertised IT jobs were remote work opportunities,” CareerJunction said.
“In January 2022, remote IT jobs reached a peak of 12.2%, however since then remote IT jobs have declined by 14.3%. Nonetheless, remote IT jobs have more than doubled since January 2021 (124.3%increase).”
“This shows that, despite the year-on-year decline, a strong trend for remote IT roles remains,” it added.
Software developers have the highest proportion of remote work vacancies in the IT sector at 56%.
CareerJunction also outlined the demand for IT skills based on region, with the highest number of vacancies being in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape.
However, it noted that demand in the three provinces declined year-on-year.
“There was, however, a decline in demand for this sector from the period of November 2021, December 2021 and January 2022 to the period of November 2022, December 2022 and January 2023 across these same three provinces,” it said.
“Potential reasons for the decline may be international layoffs, as well as job cuts, by global tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, Dell, IBM, PayPal, SAP), and Naspers (which owns Media24 and Takealot) announcing local layoffs.”
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