Bad news for tech job seekers in South Africa

While demand for IT professionals remains high, employment activity within the tech sector saw the biggest year-on-year (YoY) decline — over 20% — out of all industries covered by Career Junction.

This finding was presented as part of the company’s Employment Insights for Q2 of 2024 and is based on data collected from around 5,000 of the country’s most prominent recruiters.

Employment activity in the South African job market as a whole saw an upturn relative to the first quarter but contracted 7% compared to the same period last year.

The employment activity of a job sector is measured as the number of vacancies listed during a period.

Employment activity in the financial sector was the only industry that did not see a negative YoY change — 0%.

The IT sector, on the other hand, saw its employment activity shrink by 21% relative to quarter two of 2023.

This is higher than the decrease in employment activity for the IT sector in Q1 of the year, which saw a 15% decrease relative to the final quarter of 2023.

As a result of the decrease in employment in IT, job seeker engagement was the most improved among the different industries, rising by 39% over the period.

CareerJunction noted that a previous lack of jobseeker engagement caused this upturn.

“While a wide range of IT job seekers were previously headhunted and didn’t have to engage with the job market, this trend seems to be changing, and job seekers are starting to proactively interact with the job market more frequently than before,” the report stated.

Other sectors saw much lower levels of engagement yet still saw growth.

The finance sector had the lowest change in job seeker engagement, at 15%, and both business and management roles and admin, office, and support roles saw increases of 17%.

South Africa’s job seeker engagement increased by 20% YoY for quarter two across the board.

Within the IT sector, there was an increase in hiring activity for software development and systems/network administration positions.

There has also been a 94% increase in employer demand for AI skills over the past two years, relative to the 61% increase in job seekers with these skills.

According to CareerJunction, these AI skills are commonly found in job seekers with experience in data analysis, data warehousing, software development, systems/network administration, and teaching.

Career Junction’s parent company, The Stepstone Group, conducted a global study into how job seekers in IT and education adapt to generative AI.

This type of AI refers to models that can generate audio, images, videos, or other data. Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, and Google’s Gemini are all examples of commonly used generative AI systems.

The study lists industries where generative AI is beneficial, such as technology and IT, media, science and research, green industry and sustainability, and education and training.

Out of the 48 countries surveyed, South Africa ranked tenth in how significantly job seekers believe generative AI will affect their jobs within the next five years.

Over 36% of South African job seekers believe generative AI will significantly impact their jobs, 10 percentage points fewer than Kenyans, who envisaged the most change caused by the technology over the next half-decade.

The study divided the population into those who believed that generative AI would make them redundant, those who think their jobs will be drastically transformed, those who think some tasks will change, and those who believe they won’t be affected.

For context, Kenya was ranked number one, followed by Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, and Chile.

At the other end of the spectrum, Ireland, Austria, Estonia, Denmark, and Germany were all in the bottom five.