It is apparent that a job within the information technology industry is the 'it' industry to be in at the moment. A search across the major job portals in South Africa, such as Jobs.co.za, Pnet, Career Junction and Careers24, revealed a total of 11 457 available positions within the sector at one time.
When it comes to the IT industry, there isn't just one career direction, the industry branches out into a number of different sectors, such as telecommunications, computer hardware manufacturing, software development, IT professional services and consulting; thus offering aspiring IT candidates the ideal opportunity (and variety) in which to find their niche.
The IT industry offers great employment opportunities with rewarding salaries compared to that of other industries, because let's face it, no organisation is able to function without the right information technology infrastructure in place. Yet, the eternal struggle faced by most recruiters and companies is the demand for skills versus the supply of skilled talent. There seems to always be a struggle with a shortage of such skilled individuals in the South African IT industry. This can be seen from the salary premiums paid in relation to other professions, the more rapid career progression, high vacancy rates and high staff turnover. The demand for IT skills brings IT training into the forefront as the primary way to extend opportunities.
Jobs.co.za took a look into the local search trends for the search term “IT Jobs” to see how, what and where people are searching for positions within the industry. Google search trends show that South Africa currently ranks 3rd globally for the most popular, after India and Kenya, for this search term: “IT Jobs” in the past 12 months.
A deeper search revealed the following:
Local and international search trends and interest for “IT Jobs”
* The search term “IT Jobs” receives an average of 2 240 000 searches per month, which is just over 1% of global searches for the same term.
* The search term received its highest peak in January 2004 internationally, while the highest local peak occurred in January 2010.
* The search term started to feature in January 2004 on Google Searches in South Africa, peaking every January to date.
* In the last 12 months, the Eastern Cape has shown the most interest over this period, while in the last 30 days, Gauteng has shown the most recent interest over the period.
* Jobs.co.za took this a step further, looking into Google's Keyword Tool to find out what other local search trends are being used when searching for positions within the IT sector, as well as to find out what existing local traffic is for those specific keywords for IT Jobs.
IT content and supply
Since 2004, users have been searching the Web steadily. Searches for Web pages that have been optimised to rank for these terms ('allintitle' was included in the advanced search to find content that is optimised for the below terms) shows the following:
Despite the rapid growth in the number of people pursuing IT careers, there still exists a shortage of such skilled persons in the South African IT industry. And, similar to other industries in South Africa, there constantly seems to be a lack of skills within the most popular industries. There are vast amounts of people looking for jobs, and thousands of jobs needing skilled people – so why still the lack of finding the right people and the right people finding the jobs?
Please click here to view the tables.
