I think the biggest thing is simply that there are fewer roles being recruited for, but there are still a lot of people looking.

We have come out of a period where organisations were competing really hard for technology talent and hiring ahead of demand. That’s changed quite dramatically. Employers are being much more cautious about adding headcount, they are taking longer to approve roles and they are asking whether they genuinely need to replace someone when they leave.

What makes this market particularly difficult is that it’s not affecting every technology skill equally. You can have a very experienced technology professional struggling to find work while another person with a particular cloud, data, AI or cyber skillset is getting approached.

We are also seeing employers become much more specific. And recruitment processes themselves are taking longer. More approvals, more interviews and more scrutiny around headcount. So even where jobs exist, candidates can be sitting in processes for weeks.

The market hasn’t stopped. It’s just become much more selective.

Supply and demand have definitely shifted.

A few years ago, employers were competing for a relatively small pool of available technology professionals, and salary was one of the quickest ways to secure someone. Candidates could change jobs and command quite substantial increases.

That’s much harder to do in the current market because employers know there are more candidates available.

There is also much tighter cost control. Technology is still absolutely critical to organisations, but we are seeing much more scrutiny around technology budgets and headcount. Employers aren’t automatically approving salary increases simply because someone asks for one.

The interesting thing is that it’s not universal. There are still pockets where employers will pay a premium because the skill is genuinely difficult to find. But broadly, candidates don’t have the same negotiating leverage they had during the peak of the market.

Our own research really reflects that. We have seen the lowest proportion of people receiving salary increases in our comparative data going back to 2015.

So I wouldn’t say technology has suddenly become a low-paying profession. It’s more that the extraordinary salary pressure we saw when demand was very high has come out of the market.

I think for some people it absolutely is, particularly if they are looking for a role very similar to the one they have just left and aren’t adjusting their search to the market.

There are fewer vacancies and more competition for each one, so naturally that’s going to extend the search.

But there is another side to it. Sometimes we will speak to someone who has been looking for six months and they have applied for hundreds of jobs. When you dig into it, they may be applying very broadly rather than strategically.

The longer someone is out of work, the temptation is to apply for everything, but that can actually make the search less effective. I’d much rather see somebody identify the 20 roles where they are genuinely competitive and tailor their approach than fire off 200 applications.

I don’t think the problem is that we don’t have enough technology people. I think we have got a matching problem.

That’s actually one of the most interesting things in the current data. Employers are getting plenty of applications, but they are still saying they can’t find the technical skills they need.

Technology has become incredibly specialised. It’s no longer enough to say, “I’m a cloud engineer” or “I’m a data engineer.” A client might want a particular cloud platform, particular tooling, experience in their environment, security capability, stakeholder skills and ideally experience in their industry.

Then you have got technologies evolving so quickly that somebody who was highly sought after five years ago may find that the market has moved around them.

I don’t think standardising qualifications alone fixes that. In technology, practical experience carries enormous weight. Two candidates can have exactly the same certification and have completely different capability when you put them into a complex environment.

What I do think would help is employers getting better at separating what is genuinely essential from what is simply desirable. Sometimes we see briefs that effectively describe the one person who has already done that exact job, in that exact environment, using that exact technology.

If organisations want to solve skills shortages longer term, there also has to be some willingness to hire adjacent capability and develop people. You can’t continually ask the market for five years’ experience in skills that have only recently become mainstream.

Yes, I think entry level is probably one of the harder parts of the technology market at the moment.

AI is part of that, but I wouldn’t blame everything on AI.

A lot of the work traditionally given to junior technology employees like basic coding, testing, documentation, support, research, can now be done much faster with automation and AI-assisted tools. That means a senior person using those tools can potentially produce considerably more than they could previously.

So when an organisation has approval for one hire, there is a temptation to hire the experienced person who can be productive immediately rather than a graduate who needs six or twelve months of development.

We are seeing evidence of exactly that shift in the market.

But I think organisations need to be careful. If everybody stops hiring juniors because AI makes senior people more productive today, where do our senior engineers, architects and cyber specialists come from in five or ten years?

Offshoring is definitely something technology workers talk about, and it isn’t a new concern. Organisations have been using offshore technology capability for many years, particularly where work can be delivered remotely or at scale.

But I wouldn’t put offshoring and skilled migration into the same bucket.

With migration, what we actually see is much more nuanced. Employers aren’t simply choosing somebody because they have recently arrived in Australia and they can pay them less. There are salary requirements, employment law, market rates and, most importantly, employers still need somebody who can actually do the job.

In fact, skilled migrants can have the opposite problem. Someone can arrive here with excellent technical experience and then struggle to get their first Australian role because employers want local experience.

Australia also genuinely needs international technology talent in areas where we don’t produce enough capability domestically.

So I understand why someone who has been looking for work for six months might look at migration or offshoring and think, “That’s why I can’t get a job.” But I think the bigger issue at the moment is that overall hiring demand is softer and employers are much more selective about the skills they are buying.

I hear this all the time at the moment.

People are asking, “Do I need to become an AI specialist?” And my answer is generally no but you probably do need to understand how AI is changing your particular job.

There is a big difference.

If you are a project manager, I don’t necessarily need you to go away and become a machine-learning engineer. But I would expect you to understand how AI is being used in project delivery, what it can automate, what the risks are and how you can use it productively.

The same applies to developers, business analysts, recruiters, cyber professionals really almost everybody.

The people I think are most exposed aren’t necessarily those who don’t have “AI” written on their CV. It’s people who ignore it altogether and continue doing their job exactly the way they did five years ago.

And I wouldn’t recommend collecting AI certificates for the sake of collecting certificates. Employers are going to be much more interested in someone saying, “Here is how I’ve actually used AI to solve a problem, improve productivity or deliver a better outcome.”

There is a genuine skills gap here.

My advice would be: don’t panic and try to become an AI expert overnight. Become very good at your core profession and learn how to use AI to make yourself better at it.