Malaysia's salary and job trends for 2017

Prospects for technology recruitment in 2017 are very positive as employers are driven by Malaysia's blend of price point and quality in this sector, according to Ambition's quarterly market insights report for Q4 2016.

The report also found that Malaysia’s banking and financial services market has continued to established itself as a mainstay global service centre hub, for middle and back office functions for some of the world’s largest organisations.

The report covers salary and job outlook data across four sectors [detailed below]:

1. Technology
2. Banking and financial services
3. Finance and accounting
4. Digital

Technology - salary and job outlook 2017

Prospects are bright as employers are driven by Malaysia's blend of price point and quality. There is an uptake in the creation of centres of excellence, resulting in increased demand for specialist talent further up the value chain.

Malaysia is currently less competitive on cost point alone compared to other typical offshore centres, such as Chennai and Manila. However, if you factor in the quality, seniority and specialist nature of IT professional that can be hired here, Malaysia is now moving towards being a cost-effective alternative to Singapore and Hong Kong, a move away from the typical offshore BPO model.

Moving into Q1 2017, significant growth is expected across the following sectors:

• Infrastructure services such as networks, platforms and specialist areas such as cloud and virtualisation;
• Salaries of IT directors with more than 10 years of experience pegged at RM250k-360k per annum;
• ERP, EAI and other specialist off-the-peg solutions from large vendors such as SAP, Oracle and Salesforce;
• Solutions architect for application development can take home in the range of RM180k-250k per month.
• Business transformation, an increasingly dominant area of IT, leading to demand for professionals in project management, program management, PMO and change management.

Paul Endacott, regional MD of Asia at Ambition, commented on the necessity for businesses to go digital. "This is more so in Malaysia where there are emerging centres of excellence, resulting in increased demand for digital and technology services through investment and development whilst the country’s capital is seen as a logistically viable, cost-effective and business-friendly regional business hub."

However, he pointed out that this will cause a talent shortage despite the increase in expatriates and returning Malaysians.

"Organisations are encouraged to hire based on trainable potential and transferable qualities such as problem-solving or general coding ability, failing which these organisations will likely face a standstill and a faltering process of knowledge transfer to fuel talent growth."

 Lead photo / iStock