When is the best time of year to get a Security job in Auckland?

Over the last couple of years I have gathered the number of new job postings for particular jobs advertised on Seek. Here’s the results.

Seek is the most dominant job-posting site in New Zealand. There’s a few others, but Seek has the monopoly here. With Seek, you can set up an alerting mechanism where the site will send you an Email when new jobs are posted which meet your defined criteria. I have a few such alerts set to match keywords like security, cisco, and juniper – because I’m interested in these sort of jobs.

Over time, the Emails have been coming in and I’ve just filed them away in a folder without too much thought. I probably should have deleted them, but for some reason I decided not to. Of course, being a data-driven sort of guy, I hot to wondering if I could mine this data to show something interesting.

Here’s what I’ve got. Below are graphs showing the number of new job postings, per day, of jobs matching the certain keywords that I had set up. My data spans from 1 December 2017 through to the time of this post, so you can see just how demand for security people changes over the period of a whole year.

New Security Jobs, per day

Here is a graph showing the number of new jobs postings on Seek for jobs in the Auckland area matching the keyword security.

This is for Security positions in the IT & TeleComms industry, so positions such as security guards will hopefully be excluded.

The orange trend line here is a moving average of 10 data points, and shows the peaks and dips a bit more clearly. You can see that the trend over the year is moderately flat, but there is definitely a quiet period in December and January which corresponds to the Christmas holiday period.

New Cisco Jobs, per day

The cisco keyword matches give a pretty good picture of the demand for network skills over the year.

It’s moderately flat throughout the year, with really quiet periods in December and January.

New Juniper Jobs, per day

Juniper Networks, to be honest, isn’t a big industry player in New Zealand. They mostly sell to the service providers who have well-qualified teams in-house and don’t often need new hires.

There’s not much demand for Juniper skills, the number of data points here is really too low to draw much of a conclusion. But it basically follows the same trend that we see for Cisco.

Conclusions

You should take this data with a pinch of salt. In New Zealand the IT job market is strongly dictated by the employment agents, who will find and advertise as many positions that they can. Often, an IT company looking for a new hire will notify a number of agencies who will then all advertise the positions to Seek. Therefore there can be the illusion that there are many more jobs available than what there is in reality.

Note that the keyword match is just that – a keyword that might appear in any part of the advertisement or in it’s meta-data fields. For instance in the Security graph above, this isn’t the number of positions being advertised for IT security professionals, it’s the number of advertisements which mention security. So if a company is hiring a new project manager for a security IT project then that will result in a hit on the graph.

For most companies in New Zealand, the fiscal financial year ends on the 31st of March. The graphs each have a definite dip during March when this occurs, but note that there’s a peak in late April – this is probably due to new projects and work being created as new budgets are defined at the beginning of the new fiscal year.