THE technology employment sector is expected to strengthen in the second quarter, with hiring experts forecasting a turnaround in the market.
Hays senior regional director Peter Noblet said "positivity and growth" would return in Q2.
"We are seeing definite signs of activity in the market right now," he said. "We are predicting that there will be some fairly hefty movement within the jobs market in IT in the coming quarter."
The latest quarterly report from recruitment firm Hays sees a range of demand hotspots for IT skills.
It singles out demand for ASP.NET developers, ERP project and program managers, Microsoft business intelligence staff, SharePoint Developers and .NET developers.
Mr Noblet said senior systems engineers with strong Citrix skills, MS Exchange and SharePoint knowledge were also required. Helpdesk entry-level candidates and Citrix and VMware professionals were also sought after.
While federal government had been slowing down, it was still considered "pretty good", he said.
The public sector roles most in demand were infrastructure specialists, application packagers, cloud computing specialists, data centre architects and transition specialists.
Mr Noblet said in the Hays business there had been a 5 to 10 per cent lift in jobs registered in the past month compared with the previous month.
"The great unknown at the moment is the election coming up later on in the year and whether companies will still wait to see what happens there before heavily investing," he said.
Hudson ICT national practice director Martin Retschko said hiring intentions had improved in the last three months, up 4.8 percentage points for April to June.
"The IT industry itself also has the most positive hiring expectations of any sector," he said.
At this time last year, the IT industry had the second most positive outlook, after the resources sector, according to Hudson ICT.
"We've seen the rate of growth in the resources sector slow a little over the last 12 months as the economic environment has tightened," Mr Retschko said. "However, ICT has remained quite solid over this period as businesses look towards technology solutions in their business transformation projects."
He said there was a genuine demand for IT roles to support business transformation and IT outsourcing initiatives.
"Nationally, the need to closely align IT with the business is keeping demand high for enterprise architects," he said. "Key growth areas include cloud computing experts, relationship managers, mobile app developers and digital specialists."
Clicks IT Recruitment managing director Ben Wood expected the April to June quarter to improve on the first quarter. "The demand for IT people will steadily pick up through 2013," he said.
The recently released Clicks Recruitment and Retention Report, which surveyed 200 large-scale organisations, found stronger demand for contract labour this year.
"In a tough market, the demand for contractors leads the way out of the downturn," Mr Wood said.
"We are seeing 70 per cent of respondents saying that they will use the same or more contractors than they did last year and that is up from 64 per cent last year."
But he said the growth in the market this year would be gradual rather than a dramatic increase.
"The market has bottomed," Mr Wood said. "I'd say in six months' time we will look back at the last quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 and say it was around that time that we started seeing things turn."
Spark Recruitment director Luke Singleton agreed the market appeared to have lifted since mid-February.
"We expect that there will be continued hiring through the April to June quarter, but predict that the market will become more constrained the closer we get to the end of financial year."
He said employers were being cautious with their hiring spend and were waiting for the "perfect" candidate rather than hiring people that they needed to train or develop.
"This is particularly prevalent in the permanent market," he said.
"Contracting is still very much in flavour and we are seeing long-term, up to 12-month, engagements being offered."
Mr Singleton said the level of work in the market was consistent with the same time last year, but hiring processes had become more complex and the time to hire had extended.
"We believe that the current market conditions are here to stay for the next six to 12 months," he said
