Online hiring spikes by 28% in Q1

Growth was seen in nine key job sectors.

There is a recorded net increase of more than 3,900 unique online jobs in the first quarter of the year across nine key job sectors in Singapore, Job Tech revealed in its latest report.

According to the firm, this represents a 28% increase in online jobs compared to the previous quarter.

The sectors tracked in the study included Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Banking & Finance, Electronics & Semiconductor, Biotech & Pharmaceuticals, Government, Energy & Chemicals, Marine & Offshore, Healthcare, and Logistics.

"While there is a possible seasonal effect due to hiring patterns in the beginning of the calendar year over the end of the calendar year; generally a positive trend is observed in the number of online jobs from January to March 2017 across the 9 sectors scanned," Job Tech said.

More so, the firm detected at least 40% increase in quarter-over-quarter job growth in Energy & Chemicals, Biotech & Pharmaceuticals, and Marine & Offshore sectors when 1Q17 is compared with 4Q16. This compares favorably with previously announced online job growth in Electronics & Semiconductor (30%), ICT (27%) and Banking and Finance (40%).

In terms of emerging skills, the firm noted that the top 10 fastest growing technical skills sought-after by employers, the list included: Ruby On Rails, Hadoop, Apache Hive, Server Administration, SASS, Apache Struts and more.

Meanwhile, “Hard to fill jobs” which are jobs that have remained open for more than 90 days, identified in the 1Q17 jobs scan included: Quality Assurance; IT Administrators for Databases, Systems and Networks; and Electronics Engineers.