Candidate shortage drives salaries up for Hong Kong technology specialists

Mid-year market update: Hong Kong, Technology

Technology recruitment has remained at a fairly consistent level so far this year, with several hires made across the artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud computing (ABC) space. Although a number of banks frozen their hiring process due to Covid-19, candidates from ABC backgrounds have remained much sought after across the broader APAC market, albeit they have had fewer options to choose from than would ordinarily be the case.

In AI, many data science teams were newly set up over the last few years, hence many have not yet reached their full capacity and still have room to grow. Several organisations are beginning to merge both data governance and data analytics into one team. As the data governance framework has already been set up for most firms, the focus in 2020 has been to develop AI and/or data analytics solutions for varying business functions. In addition, sales and marketing, HR analytics, fraud detection, digital identity, speech analytics and cybersecurity all saw the implementation of AI and data analytics.

Blockchain related hiring has been fairly quiet this year. However, given the publication of the SFC’s new rules in November 2019 to allow cryptocurrency exchanges to receive an operating license, talent demand may increase across this space in order to build a proper platform fulfilled SFC requirements.

For Cloud, the current IT infrastructure is turning into IaaS and SaaS. A range of organisations are implementing these Cloud infrastructure services to monitor their remote data centers, such as compute, storage and networking. For IaaS, AWS would still be the key provider followed by Azure.

Owning a data center is very expensive for most companies, so we expect the trend of businesses moving their IT infrastructure into cloud data warehouse to continue in the second half of 2020. This flexibility to scale up/down in order to meet data demands will be a big incentive the large majority businesses.

Fundamentally, the technology space in Hong Kong is chronically candidate short. As a result, professionals can enjoy large salary increase when moving roles currently they typically range between 15%-25% for traditional IT candidates, such as developers and infrastructure managers. For candidates with ABC experience, salary premiums of 25%+ remain on offer, even in the current environment.

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