TECHNOLOGY recruitment experienced a significant decrease in hiring activity in the fourth quarter, with expectations of a slow moving year in most industries in 2013, a report finds.
The latest Ambition Market Trends Report, released today, found on the infrastructure side there was a general consensus of little or no new hires next year.
"I think people thought there would be a big charge to the end of the year, but it is just not happening," Ambitions technology division managing director Andrew Cross said.
The report also found that continued investment in mobile applications had fuelled demand for ASP.Net developers with experience in working on HTML5 and mobile compatible websites/web applications.
It said contractors in this mobile area were particularly sought after to help guide projects, which for many companies were the first of their kind to be developed internally.
"MVC3 was a niche and in demand skill earlier this year, but it is now seen by many companies as a 'must have' skill," the report said.
It found change management had become an important part of the implementation process and organisations were investing resources in the area with a view to realising real return-on-investment.
"Demand is steady for project managers (PM) and more senior business analysts (BA), who can assume some PM responsibility assuming their cost isn't too high," the study said.
The research found BA roles tend to be all-inclusive, combining elements of testing, BA and PM with a trend for more technical than commercially-focused skill sets.
"Big data continues to intrigue all and sundry with Hadoop still the leading option it would appear," it said.
The report noted several large corporate entities were adopting its use within the finance sector to extract potential value from vast petabytes of data.
"As a result, employers are seeking permanent 'business data analysts' to engage with business, marketing, finance and IT parts of the business to maximise the use of analytics," the study found.
On the infrastructure side, fixed term contracts and permanent hires were viewed more favourably than temp/contract hires and the trend was likely to continue through next year.
"People are not prepared to commit additional spend at the moment to re-fill roles," Mr Cross said. "I think that is going to come to a tipping point towards the back-end of the first quarter when people are going to have to bite the bullet and invest."
