There has been significant demand for cybersecurity workers and process engineers this quarter but the market is becoming more employer led.
Despite the past few months being dominated by tech layoffs, the Irish jobs market appears relatively stable at the moment.
According to the Morgan McKinley Ireland Quarterly Employment Monitor released today (18 April), some sci-tech sectors have seen positive levels of hiring this past quarter.
Trayc Keevans, global FDI director at Morgan McKinley Ireland, said that the team had seen an “increase in demand for certain skills”.
Across all sectors, there has been an increase in the number of professionals actively seeking new opportunities. Morgan McKinley attributes this increase to the flood of people slowly returning to the jobs market after receiving redundancy payments.
“Talk of a tech recession has dominated headlines recently and, while certain areas have contracted and companies have acted accordingly by reducing their workforces, various industries continue to go from strength to strength,” Keevans said.
“The engineering and life sciences sector has seen considerable growth. Ireland continues to be a pioneer as the sector leads the way in R&D and manufacturing.”
Keevans also said that cybersecurity professionals were in considerable demand.
“Despite the cautionary approach to hiring in the technology sector, the number of jobs coming to market has grown. The biggest area of hiring has been in cybersecurity.”
According to the report, the most commonly hired for cybersecurity positions included cybersecurity engineers, cyber analysts, infosec analysts and SOC managers. Keevans said that the banking and financial services sector was particularly active in hiring cybersecurity professionals.
In terms of other tech and engineering roles, the most in-demand positions included security analyst, full stack developer, data analyst, product manager, software engineer, automation engineer, project engineer and electrical engineer.
Process engineering is currently the most hired for position, while Java and Python are the most in-demand programming languages.
Automation positions continue to grow due to the numbers moving into the data centre industry, attracted by higher salaries and benefits.
Salaries have remained steady. However, more available positions has not translated into an ability for employees to negotiate on salary levels.
According to Keevans, this shows that the market is slowly switching from an employee-led to an employer-driven market. She said that employers are starting to be more precise in the profiles they are seeking to hire, wishing them to possess all the necessary specific skills.
“Professional service firms, specifically for accountancy and finance talent, have cooled their hiring of senior professional talent over the last quarter as they continue to navigate the potential knock-on effects from the layoffs in the tech sector.”
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