South Africa’s in-demand tech skills, and 8 top-paying IT jobs

The coronavirus pandemic has caused economic turbulence in South Africa, but IT skills are in demand and tech jobs are among the highest paying in the country. Here are the top in-demand tech skills and eight of the top-paying IT jobs in South Africa.

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The coronavirus pandemic is causing a cash crunch for businesses around the world, and enterprises in South Africa are no exception. It appears that retrenchments are on the rise, but the good news for IT is that technology expertise – especially for certain programming, cloud-tech and IT management jobs – is in demand.

Findings in a recent CareerJunction Index report reveal that the sector with the biggest opportunity for employment in South Africa is IT. Software developers are in high demand in South Africa, with more than 1,000 vacancies posted on the CareerJunction portal for professionals with programming skills during May 2020, according to the report. According to the Skills Portal website, software engineers and IT managers are in the top five highest-paying jobs in the country.

The research correlates with findings from the Adzuna Index, from jobs search engine Adzuna, which also suggest that the demand for technical skills is still high and the supply of experienced skills is still scarce in South Africa.

Due to the high demand in specialised IT skills, companies are competing to hire and retain the best talent. According to remote hiring company Codability, the median amount of time it takes to fill a position is 50 days, so in order to scale at an appropriate pace, tech companies are now looking across borders and hiring remotely, with 45 percent of developers working from home at least part of the time.

Hiring patterns for IT personnel shift

Nevertheless, the pandemic and its resulting economic uncertainty has caused a shift in hiring patterns, even for IT personnel.

“Right now, a lot of companies are not keen to hire permanent staff,” said Nicola Williams, IT recruiter and business development manager at Goldenrule IT Recruitment Services in Johannesburg. Many GoldenRule clients are working with employees they already have, doing internal recruitment, she said. Tech consulting companies have been impacted, with some even shutting down.

“I am flooded with messages every day from individuals who are on the market because they are facing retrenchment or are already retrenched,” Williams said. “Although there is a demand for IT skills, the requests for now are mostly contracting and very few have the power to offer permanent jobs.”

Given the constraints that the pandemic has caused, IT workers who want to advance their careers, earn more, find new jobs or permanent staff positions, need to understand market dynamics,  which skills are most in demand, and which jobs pay best.

Flexible work practices attract IT workers

“Companies in SA are being forced to adopt new ways of working,” said Liza Van den Berg, global recruitment specialist at Afrizan People Intelligence, based in Johannesburg. “We are in a deliverables-based market and a lot of companies have had to learn to trust their workforce to work from home and in turn gauged that they can actually trust their employees to deliver. There’s been a massive upswing in roles offering flexi and remote work within IT. This in itself has been a golden carrot for most developers.” 

According to specialist recruitment firm Michael Page, many companies in South Africa are considering different approaches to boost output and productivity while keeping costs down,  and are thus looking to make advances in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

The effort to embrace new ways of working, and new technologies, has had an impact on the jobs market. There has been “a shift in the skills in demand,” said Van den Berg. Recruiting specialists broadly agree.

“What we are seeing is a move towards artificial intelligence, data science, big data and cloud,” said GoldenRule’s Williams.

At the start of coronavirus pandemic, GoldenRule saw a peak in demand for traditional COBOL and Hogan mainframe-banking developers, but as the crisis wore on, there were several shifts in the types of specialties employees sought, Williams said. While Java and C# developers are still in demand, there’s a growing demand for experience in containerisation and cloud, she added. “I’ve also noticed a trend at the start of lockdown in South Africa where a lot of companies needed more than usual employees working as security specialists,” Williams said.

In-demand skills in South Africa

Other in-demand skills and experience noted by recruitment specialists include:

• Angular: The popular web development created by Google, recently received a major upgrade. “It’s becoming a common household name in IT,” Williams said.
• SQL: Structured Query Language has been around for 40 years, but is still the standard way to manipulate and query data in relational databases.
• Python: Useful in data analytics and AI applications, its popularity has soared due to the rise of data science and machine learning.
• Cloud computing skills: Experience with scaling cloud applications — understanding cost, performance, and architecture of cloud systems – is a must for some of IT’s highest-paying jobs.
• IT management skills: Management and administrator positions typically call for experience with a range skills involving: ITSM (IT service management); I&O (infrastructure and operation) and IT governance, including formal methods of aligning IT strategy with business strategy; and vendor management.

“Cloud architecture, big data, data architects and AI devs will continue to dominate as we move into the future. Business analysts will have to become more technical to keep up,” Williams said. “We almost never receive requests for functional business analysts. Every client wants someone who has a technical background.”

While programming, cloud-related, and project management skills are most in demand, which jobs pay the most? Below is CIO Africa’s list of top-paying IT jobs in South Africa, based on PayScale and other recruitment agency sources. Salaries include bonus and profit sharing pay. Note that salaries are averages, and they vary, increasingly so toward the top of the list. The pay range in higher-paying jobs tend to vary greatly depending on size of enterprise, and CIO salaries can vary as much as 50 percent from the average.

CIO (chief information officer)

Average pay: R125,000/month (US$7,000/month)

The CIO has the top IT leadership role in an enterprise. The position, though, has for some time moved away from a focus on technology to a role that involves business strategy and process transformation. CIO skills are now expected to align with those traditionally associated with top executive management, including industry knowledge, communication and management skills.

Cloud architect

Average pay: R83,000/month

Cloud architects have high-level responsibilities that include leading overall cultural change for cloud adoption, as well as developing and coordinating cloud architecture. Tasks also may include cloud application design, cloud approval plans, and management of systems required to manage cloud storage.

Enterprise infrastructure manager

Average pay: R77,000/month

Enterprise infrastructure managers monitor, coordinate and manage network and associated systems, hardware and application platforms.  

Director of application development

Average pay: R75,000 per month

Application development directors plan and manage the design, development and implementation of all software applications in an enterprise, setting goals for team members and monitoring project timelines.

Chief information security officer (CISO)

Average pay:  R73,000/month

The chief information security officer (CISO) is the executive responsible for an organisation’s information and data security, overseeing real-time analysis of security threats, and managing identity and access management, and implementing risk-mitigation projects.

IT project manager

Average pay: R42,000/month

Project managers ensure that projects come in on-time, on or under budget, with high-quality standards that meet project goals. Project managers are in demand as enterprises struggle to achieve digital transformation.

Software engineer

Average pay: R37,000/month

Software engineers use their knowledge of programming and software architecture principles to design and develop computer systems software and applications.

Business intelligence analyst

Average pay: R33,000/month

Business intelligence (BI) analysts use data analytics, data visualization and data modeling techniques to  transform data into insights that drive business value for enterprises.

Credit: Heath Muchena, CIO.com