Demand for Talent
The overall demand for technology talent throughout 2020 has been very steady. While the year has certainly been tougher than usual for many businesses, most would agree that falling behind on the execution of key technology agendas would only make life more difficult. Mid-High Frequency Firms – who thrive off volatility – have accelerated technology hiring to capitalize on growth opportunities. As have many FinTech companies and consumer groups in digital banking due to increased demand. However, more traditional firms with longer-term investment horizons have slowed down significantly, although we are starting to see a slight uptick at the backend of the year.
In-Demand Skillsets
Data engineering remains a growth area for several of our clients. As global markets have continued to shift aggressively, the increased need for better, cleaner, more accessible data is paramount to form better market predictions. There has also been a strong desire for industry talent. Given the barriers to a job move caused by COVID, we are seeing higher acceptance ratios for candidates with finance experience. Across infrastructure, we have seen an uptick in cloud engineering as more and more clients have had to make the shift towards virtual cloud environments in response to COVID. This need to be remote has also caused many buy-side clients to expand & enhance their support engineering staff to ensure everything is running smoothly. SRE is another area that has held steady in 2020, as most of our clients are now looking to bring on full-scale teams within this space.
Forecast for Future Talent Trends
Judging by the recent activity at the backend of this year, in addition to many of the conversations we have had with our clients across the industry, we are anticipating a very big year ahead with regards to technology hiring for 2021. Core Developers with exceptional skills across all predominant object oriented programming languages are highly sought-after and this is an area that we continue to make over 100+ placements in every single year. We have also continued to see a huge shift on the creative technology side of things and Front-End and Full-Stack talent seems to be an ever-growing area of need as the demand for more aesthetic and user-friendly software remains paramount for many businesses. On the infrastructure side, DevOps and SRE functions are continuing to scale at a rapid rate while Production Engineers are also being utilized heavily in creating a more fluid and optimized technology environment. We are even seeing a significant shift in traditional Software Engineers making a move into these reliability functions as they allow them to be more impactful at times while continuing to leverage their programming skills. This function is no longer seen as predominantly operational. With the expansion to remote ensuring strong networks has been vital to the success of our clients, as such we anticipate enhanced growth in the network engineering space. The Cloud and leveraging hybrid-analytics also seem to be a key area of investment for many businesses so we anticipate a huge uptick in Cloud Infrastructure hiring over the next 12-18 months.
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