High Skilled Professionals See Premium Pay Rise

Those in highly paid occupations such as IT architects, IT project managers, IT managers, Doctors & medical specialists are seeing their wages rise faster than people in any other industries. A recruitment agency says the reason is  because of a lack of competition partly due to people migrating out of New Zealand, leaving positions such as in the IT business world easy to come by and with wages on offer like they are now the prediction is there won’t always be so many vacancies. The recruitment agency says there advice to anyone thinking of migrating into New Zealand to work in highly skilled jobs such as within IT, is to move here now while the opportunity is so good and the wages are incredible.

The Hays Global Skills Index 2013 has scored New Zealand a 10 - the highest possible score - for "wage pressure in high-skill industries" meaning the rate at which wages in these industries are rising is much faster than in low-skill industries.

Employers are under pressure to increase wages in response to the shortage of skills in high-skill industries and as a result, a premium is paid for those in residential construction and engineering and software development which had seen year on year pay movements of more than 10 per cent.

"In May there were 1500 software development roles just in Auckland so those sorts of figures will drive up salaries more than in some other industries," said Mr Walker who is head of the Hays Global Skills for New Zealand. He also said the Christchurch rebuild and a surge in activity in the residential, industrial and commercial building sectors meant architects and designers were also in serious demand and just yesterday there were 218 job vacancies listed under Design and Architecture  with nearly half of those located in Auckland.

Jobs in the IT sector were among the highest paid roles in New Zealand, with an average salary of $90,529, which is 24 per cent higher than the average wage ($72,731). Engineering roles salaries have also increased markedly, rising 5.1 per cent to $89,859. Dr’s and Medically qualified persons were always the highest earners in New Zealand but are now in at number 5.