ITCRA, the peak body representing specialised ICT recruitment agencies, has released the first report from its SkillsMatch initiative, which provides "real job" data on skills monitoring and supply and demand in the ICT industry.

Placement and demand data provided by (initially) 25 major agencies has been analysed to give Federal, Victorian and Queensland Governments, and ITCRA members trending information on the ICT labour market.

Launching its first report, containing data from the April-June 2007 quarter, ITCRA president Penny Coulter said the SkillsMatch system broke new ground because the data involved real jobs and placements, rather than surveys or counts of job ads. "It generates reports on more than 40 ICT labour force indicators, including the number of placements made each month; placements by industry, occupation, gender and age; suitable candidates per placement; time-to-fill; length of contracts; job locations; and qualifications required." "The data also covers all states and territories proportionally and aligns with the new ANZSCO occupation classification," she said. While the data is useful for recruitment industry benchmarking, government departments are also expected to use it to forecast ICT skills demand, project costing, training needs and immigration demand (the federal government provided significant funding to establish the system). Data for the first report in the series came from 25 initial partners, covering 1588 placements (or about 25 per cent of the national ICT recruitment market). The report shows that in the April-June quarter:

• the greatest proportion of placements was for help desk/support technicians (20 per cent), business analysts/consultants (13.8 per cent) and project managers (13.2 per cent); • the ICT services and software industry accounted for the largest proportion of total placements (37.4 per cent), followed by government, defence and public safety (17.4 per cent) and financial and insurance services (15.7 per cent);

On average, there were seven suitable candidates for each placement. The number of suitable candidates per role was lowest in May (5.7), and it took an average 17.9 working days to fill an ICT placement.

Candidates generally exceeded the level of education required by clients (i.e., more candidates had bachelor degrees, diplomas and postgraduate qualifications than were required by employers), and the average salary of total ICT placements was $107,014.

Among occupations where salaries were specified, the highest averages were for multimedia specialists ($146,900), project managers ($146,338) and business development managers ($143,200); and

The top 10 ICT skills in demand during the quarter were: Windows-related (161); project-related (140); help desk (92); MS-related (90); business analysts (84); SQL-related (84); testing-related (82); Java (50); C-related (49); and Web management (46).

Next report expected to cover 50 per cent of market. ITCRA executive director Norman Lacy says another five or six companies are currently preparing to contribute data to SkillsMatch (this requires integration of their back-end systems), and by the time of the next quarterly report, the sample size will have doubled.

In the first half of July, more than 500 placements were recorded. The reports are available only to SkillsMatch partners and ITCRA clients. See www.itcra.com