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New Zealand Desperate For IT Specialists

It has recently been announced in New Zealand that migration is the only way to bridge the current skills gap for IT companies.  The IT industry in New Zealand is growing rapidly, generating an estimated 3,000 new jobs each year. These roles aren’t being filled by existing training initiatives, even though there are more IT graduates coming through the system, so companies are looking to skilled migrants as new employees.

The demand for these skilled migrants in New Zealand is likely to be high for years to come as demonstrated by a recent survey from NZTech. This found tech companies want to recruit an estimated 10,000 employees in the next three years.

Jobs in ICT are available on the long-term skill shortages list which can be seen at: http://skillshortages.immigration.govt.nz/. These are varied, from web developers to IT support engineers and telecommunications engineers.

IT could offer a profitable and long running career prospect for migrants as it is a major and growing business for New Zealand, contributing over $30 billion to GDP in 2014 (around 40 per cent attributable to telecommunications) and growing at over 9 per cent a year,

Recent immigrant to New Zealand, Julian Ilott, was inspired to make the move to improve his quality of life. In the UK he was dealing with a two-hour commute each way. With a career as a software testing specialist, he found the process of finding a job and moving very easy. He was offered a job in IT, given a work visa and simply made the move. Julian said, “I guess I’m quite lucky in terms of my skills within IT – we’re in demand.”

On his lifestyle he said, “One of the nice things here is that you can just take the horse for a ride on the beach. It’s the sort of thing we used to do on holiday but here we can do it any day of the week.”

 

The full story can be seen at: https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/resources/city-job-rural-living