Availability of professional jobs increased by 12.3% in June

The availability of professional jobs increased by 12.3 per cent in June compared to the same month a year ago, according to the Morgan McKinley Ireland Employment Monitor.

The monitor, which tracks the number of new job vacancies and new candidates within the Republic each month, also showed the number of professional job vacancies increased by 3.11 per cent nationally since May.

There was a reduction of 3.7 per cent in the number of professionals seeking new roles in June compared to the previous month.

The monitor also recorded a decrease of 14.4 per cent in the number of professionals actively seeking new job opportunities in June, compared to June 2017.

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“This reflects current economic conditions and the fact that Ireland’s unemployment rate has fallen to a new low of 5.1 per cent,” the company said.

Morgan McKinley Ireland global FDI director Trayc Keevans said the growth in the jobs market was across multiple sectors.

“Despite the expected seasonal slowdown, the professional recruitment market remained comparatively strong in June,” she said.

“We’re seeing consistent growth in the professional jobs market in equal measure across both the domestic and multinational sectors, which is in line with recently released IDA Ireland figures for the first half of 2018.

“There were notable developments across finance, data analytics and cybersecurity with attention from multinationals and FDI companies increasingly focused on larger centres outside Dublin, with Cork, Galway, Limerick and Sligo already acting as growth focal points.”

The sectors hiring in the greatest numbers for the month of June included healthcare, telecommunications and medical devices.

“Data Analysts remained at the forefront of IT recruitment for June,” said Ms Keevans. “There has been specific interest in specialists with exposure to big data frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop.

“From a skills perspective, hiring managers are looking for data specialists who are confident in liaising with business stakeholders in order to ensure that data is utilised effectively.”

Ms Keevans also said there was “a spike in demand” for data protection professionals across the market in response to GDPR, which is the new EU framework for data protection.

“In an effort to align with regulatory standards, businesses have acted swiftly in bolstering their data protection function so that personal data is managed and protected accordingly,” she said.

“From an IT perspective, we have seen heightened hiring activity of security specialists in particular. There has also been an increase in the hiring of administrative professionals, solely for the purpose of coordinating GDPR related tasks and queries.

“Their duties include processing subject access requests, responding to data breach notifications, documenting such notifications, and other similar coordination responsibilities.”

With the unemployment rate now stands at 5.1 per cent, the lowest in 15 years, competition to attract global professional talent “has never been as fierce”.

“The task for the economy now is to see how we can create enduring stability to support all of these positive factors when there is increasing pressure on infrastructure and resources to underpin and maintain national competitiveness,” she added.