Whirlpool

I was wondering if anyone could give me a heads up on what Sydney's IT support job market is like at the moment for tier 2 and tier 3 support. Looks like plenty of jobs in seek but I don't know if thousands of unemployed IT guys are going for them. I'm about to reach the end of a long term contract and interested to know what I'm getting myself into.

Cheers.

into shit is probably close to the mark

Man I thought I would have gotten a bigger response from people. I guess everyone is pretty over talking about it. My work is being an arse and offering the contractors 17,000 less a year to go on as Full time fixed term. Which means they can still don't have to pay out redundancy payments if they sack us. Not sure if its better to just quit and find new work or take the crappy pay and try finding a job at the same time but that means I have to give one months notice.... sucks so much.

Not sure about in Sydney, but some of our current team changed the recruitment agency to HP preferred one (Manpower) and were offered lower / hour rate for same position. It sucks but the market is really bad.

My recent experience with recruiters and companies, it used to be that employer will consider if a candidate was 90% good but lack one or 2 side skills, but currently they need 100% -150% match and are not afraid to wait for right candidate even if it takes them 2 months and will still pay peanuts.

so my advise will be keep your existing contract for time even if it is paying low as you still have job which will pay most of the bills and keep looking for better one.

Cheers.

Quite honestly the worst it's been in 10 years – which is as long as I have been in the support arena.

Agencies barely have anything and what little they do the clients are culling down to those with everything they ask for then choosing the cheapest rate someone will accept. This from at least 4 different contacts I have in agencies.

Hold on I'd say...new financial year should shake things up with companies budgets reseting. At least we all hope they will. For the moment its a buyers market and there is a lot of IT unemployed out there serving themselves up in a fire sale until things improve.

more IT jobs available in Sydney than any other areas in oz. That being said, i've got some friends unemployed with a weath of professional xp, that is finding it tough to break back in.

My desk is near the Helpdesk department and they're doing fine, paid decent at around ~60k doing level 1-2, they actually needed one another guy as a contract worker for a few months.

Helpdesk would be worst case senario

I would suggest ElMaxico, that you might need to re-evaluate what you want. You just might need to consider Help Desk more. It seems that most of the jobs going are being listed as Help Desk, and if you get some rats of employers like my last one, he will adveryise one rate, and then say that your qualifications are not exactly what he is looking for, even though they are better, and then offier you $10k less.

At least thats what he did for the IT guys he hired after me, I got in when he really needed some IT savy person, and wouldn;t accept any less than I was worth.

I know for a fact that he has gone through 3 guys since I left as they only tak ethe role to make ends meet

ElMaximo writes...

Full time fixed term

Seems to be a lot of this going around lately....It stinks. I've been avoiding fixed term like the plague. If I'm on contract, pay me daily rates.

2 companies that I have come across using this method in my field are Alphawest and Tata Consultancy Services. Everyone else knows you piss off a contractor by doing fixed term – because whereever I have worked – they say 6 months – they mean 6 months! For my work – fixed term offers no more security than a standard daily/hourly rate contract – just an opportunity to lose some weight when I become unemployed with no savings.

It seems wrong to me that they can offer us contractors a full time fixed contract position at a lesser rate. The contract company gets paid out so there happy, the employer gets to pay less and don't have to pay redundancies. And the employee just gets the arse.