When we first arrived in Australia in 2001, the IT market seemed pretty flat. We were lucky in that my husband had worked for a multinational over in NZ and the Australian branch of the company agreed to take him on a similar role (Field Engineer - break-fix).
For reference, I'm dual Aussie-Brit so husband got into NZ on a spouse visa for PR and then 18 months later we moved to Australia - once again he arrived on a spouse visa. He's now also an Aussie citizen. He had 8 years IT experience doing break-fix upon arrival in NZ.
He didn't have any paperwork at all when arriving in NZ from the UK (MSCE etc.) but trained with his new company in Wellington and arrived in Melbourne with a CCNA and one MCP. He was frustrated at having worked in more senior positions in the UK but because he was an 'unknown' in NZ, they knocked him back down the scale - and things didn't approve once in Australia.
Times were tough and he was only taken on as a contractor and worked insane hours to keep his job including a miserable 24 hour on-call requirement during which time he was frequently called out during the early hours having worked a full day. In late 2003 he was taken on permanently but the climate still wasn't good - it was a case of weathering the storm well and truly until things picked up.
6$6000I found this on a bulletin board and decided to try it. A little while back, I was browsing through newsgroups, just like you are now, and...
Morale in his company bottomed out in the last 6 months and a number of engineers started looking for alternative employment. Every single one of the six engineers that left walked into jobs within four months from when they first started looking, some within a couple of weeks. One guy then didn't like the job he went to, so left that somewhat hastily after just 3 months and found work within a week (around Christmas too - not traditionally a high recruiting time).
These were all hardware engineers doing break-fix mostly on laptops - earning a minimum of AUD$50k plus super. All are now receiving a higher salary - in some cases, as much as AUD$ 20-30k higher plus benefits.
In his field - he's now a Systems Administrator-Storage Specialist (EMC Symmetrix and Clariion), things have picked up dramatically in the last 6 months. There have been big pushes in security, networking and storage. My husband has just been offered another job (approached by an agent) with a further $10k rise plus super - but turned it down as the work-family balance wasn't there and he'd be up before the children and back after they'd gone to bed. Higher wages doesn't necessarily equal a better quality of life.
Programmers seems to always be in demand especially Java folk. A lot of the ISP companies appear to be recruiting hard right now too.
Hope that helps - I can only speak for the little pocket of the IT industry that we have been involved with and then, only in Melbourne - right now, it appears to be an employees' market but it's been a long wait for us to see it this way.
We are keeping our fingers crossed that the much smaller Perth IT market will also be as buoyant in the area of concern - we move there permanently later this year.
Good luck.
