The Sunshine Coast Regional Innovation Project Team (SCRIPT) has invested in understanding Sunshine Coast technology businesses current and future specialist digital skill demand and talent supply requirements, with the goal of providing industry relevant recommendations to current and future education products, and ultimately build our region's digital skill pipeline. During August and September 2020, the Sunshine Coast Digital Demand Survey was open to Sunshine Coast technology businesses, organisations, or employers. 33 survey responses were received from 30 separate organisations: 89% were from the Sunshine Coast region; 61% had senior leadership roles; 79% were from organisations with less than 100 staff where on average 76% of their total workforce required digital skills; 64% of respondents were from organisations from either the professional, scientific, and technical services or information media and telecommunications industry sectors. Whilst the nature of the fast-moving environment of technology, the rapidly changing growth rate of emerging and current skill requirements and vendors, and the impact of Covid-19 is acknowledged, this exploratory project captures valuable information and opinions current at this point in time as well as providing a platform for future investigations to be built on. By analysing survey responses for both demand and supply requirements, the following digital skills received the highest survey responses (all higher than 30%) for having both the greatest demand for and highest difficulty to source skills, noting web app development, website creation and UI/UX design displayed a higher demand yet were considered easy to source:
- Information Security (Cyber Security)
- Cloud Engineering
- Data Analyst
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Robotics and Process Automation
- Specialist Database Developer
Furthermore, Information Security (Cyber Security) was the only one of these skills to be in both the top five of the 'often' in demand list and the 'hard' to source list, coming in second on both lists with 45% and 54% of responses respectively. With 82 separate software development skills identified in the survey the complexity of software development skills requirements for organisations was displayed. This survey captured the following five software development skills as the most frequently mentioned software development skills required by survey participants:
- NET
- Python
- Java
- C/C++/C+/C#
- Node
However, as emphasized by project technical advisors further categorizing into vendor specific skills, skill type (e.g. framework, platform etc.) and skill growth areas would beneficial. The importance of this is illustrated when you consider that 27% of the 15 top software development skills identified in the survey were considered to be of 'high growth' skills, compared with 42% considered to be 'low growth' skill areas. Of the top five most frequently mentioned software development skills only Python and Node were also considered high growth area skills.
To read full Survey Findings, click here.
