Employment and Remuneration Trends for Tech, Software and IT Professionals Report

The 2024 Employment and Remuneration Trends for Tech, Software and IT Professionals Report is now available.

The report focuses on the remuneration and employment of Australian Tech, Software and IT professionals as well as the opportunities and challenges facing the workforce in the current economic environment.

Overall, Tech and IT professionals in Australia benefit from having in-demand skills, which means they can attract good remuneration packages relative to other employment sectors. However, these benefits are not evenly enjoyed by all Tech, Software and IT professionals. The sector is increasingly differentiated, with Tech and IT professionals facing different rewards and challenges based on where they are employed.

Professionals Australia’s membership increasingly reflects this differentiated workforce. We have applied a segmentation model to this year’s remuneration report to better reflect how workers in all parts of the industry are faring.

The segmentation used in this year’s report distinguishes between the following four industry segments:

• New Tech: large software companies in the private sector operating on models approximating those common in Silicon Valley (e.g. Atlassian, Canva, Google Australia, Xero).
• Traditional Tech: other private sector companies operating in either the Computer System Design and Related Services or Internet Service Providers, Web Search Portals and Data Processing Services industries. 
• Gaming: employers in the game design and development industry.
• Other Industries: IT professionals working for employers in industries outside of IT, including the public sector.

Larger employers in the New Tech and Traditional Tech segments are able to offer significantly higher and more competitive remuneration packages which regularly encompass stock options and a wider variety of noncash benefits such as formal mentoring opportunities. By comparison, Tech and IT professionals working in the game design and development sector or who work for employers in industries outside of IT – including the public sector – have comparatively low salaries and benefits. The reduced remuneration of Tech and IT professionals working in these areas is somewhat offset by shorter working hours, greater compensation for additional hours worked, and greater job security.

Those working in the game design and development sector, for example, were over three times less likely to have had redundancies take place in their workplace in the past 24 months when compared to those working for employers in the New Tech sector.

Working conditions and workplace cultures are of increasing concern to many Tech and IT professionals, with apprehensions about job insecurity in light of mass redundancies, and high levels of anti-social behaviour in the workplace reported by some groups . Though Australia remains on track to need hundreds of thousands of new IT workers by 2030, in this period of “reconfiguration” or “redistribution of tech talent” as its being called, IT workers are being told they need to be more agile and lower their expectations if they want to secure or keep a job. In an industry in which workers are already routinely expected to work unpaid overtime, workers are increasingly being asked to work outside their job description, or to upskill on their own time and at their own expense. In an environment like this, the line between “agility” and “exploitation” can be particularly blurry.

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