Programming now a top-20 occupation, census data shows

Software and application programming has become one of Australia’s top-20 occupations, and tech employment grew strongly across the board between the 2016 and 2021 Census.

At 470,000 in 2021, the number of people holding an IT qualification grew by 36 percent since 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced in a sector analysis released today.

The number of software and applications programmers grew 47 percent between 2016 and 2021, reaching nearly 117,000 people.

Two thirds of software and application developers were born overseas, and the ABS said India represented the largest cohort.

About 24,000 came to Australia since 2016, making that the third most common occupation for recent overseas arrivals, behind commercial cleaners and general sales assistants.

Artificial intelligence remained a niche field, with the ABS only recording 630 people identifying it as their employment in 2021, while “security science” was the fastest-growing qualification, up 460 percent between the two censuses to 5805 people.

Australian statistician Dr David Gruen said there were also "over 260,000 ICT Professionals and 74,000 ICT Managers in the workforce, an additional 86,000 since the last census”.

The ABS clarified to iTnews that ICT professionals and ICT managers are distinct categories in its datasets.

Other fast-growing ICT occupations included ICT support and test engineers (which grew 54 percent to 15,635 people), and ICT business and systems analysts (up 47 percent to 34,793).

Gender diversity in the tech sector is also showing signs of improvement: while only one in five “ICT professionals and ICT managers” (a distinction made by the ABS) is female, one in three ICT business and systems analysts and ICT managers under age 30 is a woman, it said.