IT: Migration blamed for salary drop

Absolute IT – a North Island based recruitment firm, which claims to “captures over 39,000 real-time contract and permanent employees’ remuneration as entered into itsalaries.co.nz”, has released it's latest Remuneration Report.

The Report, rather controversially, while analysing the salaries, reported a slight dip and linked it to migration.

Grant Burley, Director Absolute IT, noted, “Over the last two years, the median base salary has been fluctuating, which led us to explore the underlying drivers for this trend. And evidence from our Auckland office pointed to new migrants entering the IT job sector at a much lower rate than the going market rate.”

“So there's an inverse trend here. IT median salaries would rise when overseas applications are falling and IT salaries would fall again when overseas applications are on the rise. This explains why Auckland has experienced the biggest drop in IT median salaries (down 2.5percent) as it is also the area with the highest rate of migrant arrivals.”

Meanwhile, IT professionals in Christchurch, contrary to trend, saw the highest jump in their salary packages [by 6.6 percent], according to the Report.