In our previous articles, we talked a bit about Singapore’s push for data scientists and web developers. Reflective of this, one needs to look no further than the news; in recent times, it seems almost habitual that the the government introduces new budgets and initiatives in a bid to boost our ICT capabilities. Many of these reports toss around numbers and figures that while are oftentimes of astronomical denominations, are hardly ever noted or understood by readers. If anything, through personal experiences of my own, I find that many remain apathetic to aforementioned news. On the other hand, ICT-centric articles that discuss figures pertinent to the job seeker almost often gets noticed and gets people excited. This being the case, I chose to do up this short piece chiefly to move away from the dizzying developments poised for the IT industry in Singapore and point in the direction of numbers and figures that very well concerns you, the reader.

These figures have been extracted from the Graduate Employment Survey (GES) 2016/2017 which you can view here.

Salary

This years GES 2016/2017 have indeed uncovered that in response to the shortfall of ICT professionals in the current economy, employers have indeed begun offering greater payscales to ICT trained graduates. Fresh graduates in computing have indeed seen the greatest jump in salary this past year. In fact, graduates in computing courses from NUS, NTU, SMU have returned as the top 23 most well paid upon graduation. Particularly, the median gross monthly salaries of Information Systems and Computer Science graduates from NUS have topped the charts in greatest year on year increases. The averages for both courses now stand at SGD$4000.

In case you think this is still underwhelming, a separate survey done in Singapore by Big Cloud Recruitment have uncovered that the average annual salary of a junior data scientist of $SGD59480 clearly outstrips that of the average graduate who garners $SGD42000 annually. Cue shameless plug, do sign up for our data science courses!

Employment

Borrowing the findings of the GES2016/2017 again, one can see that graduates in computing courses form NUS, NTU, SMU are among the top 35 in most well employed, this being judged by permanent employment rates. Computer Science graduates from NTU bring up the rear with a 91.3% permanent employment rate.

This looks to remain stable or even go up because of an acute shortage of ICT professionals as reported by one study by the Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2016. The same report found that a prospective 30000 ICT specialists will be needed by 2020. Given that, it would seem apparent that the employability of coders and programmers would most certainly stay robust.

With that being said, I acknowledge the limited relatability these figures have given that many jobseekers have already long past their university days. Be that as it may, these figures still do provide concrete evidence of the overall upward trajectory of coding and ICT skills. It would be a wasted opportunity then for one not to ride this wave of progress.

 

The path to being an ICT professional is not an easy one, but Hackwagon Academy will be there to guide you along.

 

This article was written by Joshua Chan, an intern here at Hackwagon Academy.