Industry hopes of an upturn in Australian IT jobs have suffered another blow with job advertisements in the Information Technology and Telecommunications (IT&T) sector falling a further 3 percent in April.
According to the index, maintained by Olivier Recruitment Group, this brings the total decline to almost 5 percent since December 2001, and to 73 percent for the past year.
The National Internet Job Index for all sectors flattened with a fall of less than half a percent after strong growth in recent months.
This is a worrying trend. Can you imagine how much worse it will become once many businesses are hit by the new hike in Microsoft licences fees in August? Many reports indicate a doubling of software licence costs. With all this money flowing to vendors, there's little surprise that not much is left in the IT budget to pay for new staff, or for pay rises. It's probably the reason why we are having such an increase in interest in Linux workstations. OpenOffice and current releases of Linux, are ready to take over from overly expensive, proprietary solutions. The document formats are 99% interchangeable, and almost all users will slip into an 'I know this!' comfort-zone with modern Linux desktops and applications.
Save your staff. Save your salary. Consider Linux.