Tech trend creates surge in emerging sciences

A year after graduating Jason Crout has a job that doesn’t feel like work in a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to help clients avoid future disasters.

As a site reliability engineer at Pearson, Mr Crout works with developers who use AI modelling to forecast how something like a global pandemic might impact businesses.

The 22-year-old’s passion for robotics and software development landed him a role in one of Australia’s fastest-growing industries, Australian Bureau of Statistics data has revealed.

Work and study in emerging science and technology overall increased significantly from 2016 to 2021, with support and test engineer jobs up 54 per cent to 15,635 people now employed in the sector.

The fastest-growing qualification in Australia was security science, up 460 per cent from 2016 to 2021.

Mr Crout, a mentor for others making the career transition, said most companies were looking for some form of tech experience.

“There’s definitely an awareness right now that technology as a whole is an incredibly important emerging sector,” he said.

“It’s a passion for me, so it doesn’t really feel like work.”

Penny Kyburz, from the ANU School of Computing, said while Canberra had a culture of fostering tech talent and encouraging entrepreneurism, Australia as a whole had a long way to go.

“We’re suffering from really extreme brain drain because of the comparative opportunities and programs that exist overseas,” Dr Kyburz said.

“Over the last decade especially there’s been very little government support for entrepreneurial activities in the tech industry.”

As head of the ANU Computing’s industry-linked educational programs, Dr Kyburz said start-ups were tripping over themselves to get students into jobs.

“There are so many companies that are really desperate to scale up. They can’t get access to the students coming out of the programs fast enough,” she said.

For graduates, the world is “kind of their oyster” in terms of what tech businesses will offer.

“Companies are a lot more flexible than they were previously in terms of being able to work from home and basically work wherever you want,” Dr Kyburz said.

“If you study computer science, you have employers fighting over you before you even graduate from the programs, which is nice.”

Information technology recorded one of the biggest increases in university applications in 2021, rising 2.2 per cent year-on-year. The number of offers made also increased, growing by 3.9 per cent year-on-year.

Migration was a major contributor to the tech force over the last few years. Two-thirds of programmers currently working in Australia were born overseas. India represented the largest cohort.

One-in-five information communication technology managers were female in the last census.

Dr Kyburz said gender diversity remained a significant challenge for computer science and engineering, with very little changing over the last 20 years.

“It’s still sitting at around the 20 to 25 per cent women in computing and engineering degrees, which is obviously much lower than we’d like it to be,” she said.

“Another challenge is making sure we keep them throughout their education and careers.

“In technology, women are more likely to leave during their higher education studies and then more likely to leave at all points throughout their careers.”

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