Slow but steady demand for personnel

There is a slow but steady, with many bumps along the way, upturn in demand for people in the electronic industry, says Roy Dickson, senior consultant, Technology Australia Wide Personnel Engineering, Manufacturing and Technical Recruiters. Employers have been taking up the slack after a year of running below capacity but latest signs are that expansion may be about to bud and blossom.

Technology demand for C#.Net Developers has been high but very specific in terms of experience and with strong emphasis on design process. Embedded software demand has been middling and we need to see growth in traditional embedded system users, such as motor vehicle, for there to be a real upsurge in embedded software demand.

Several small to mid-sized companies in emerging technologies are beginning to peep out from under the snow to see if the sun is shining, and in some cases, it is! The old saying is that one swallow does not a summer make, but we hope that it certainly means that winter is over.

Opportunities for electronics hardware engineers are still few and far between and the renewable industries are not producing the jobs that we would all like to see - yet that's where everyone wants to work!

Salaries are always hard to predict, and the key feature in any company's recruitment plans is to find the right person and then try and afford his or her expectations. Recent experience has shown that for the right person the company will dig fairly deep, but they expect the person to deliver on many fronts.

It could become a hectic spell soon but we are aware that a fairly large number of people are really struggling to find a position or a position that really motivates them and which pays moderately well.