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Salary Guide 2022 (Full)
Salary Guide 2022 by Department
Executive Summary From Adie McGennis, CEO
What a year! We came into the year with high uncertainty but hope that we had all seen the chaotic stage of the pandemic over and a “New Normal” (or “New Abnormal”) giving stability and growth to businesses and economies.
Equity markets and job vacancies grew in the first half of 2021 to record levels. At Sigmar, we had experienced our strongest month in twenty years by May and have broken business records since then. It applied to both the permanent and temp/contract jobs market. This in itself, is unusual because generally strong markets see an increase in permanent hiring, and less utilisation of temps and contractors. Such was the nearly frenzied, demand that companies looked for any solution to enable their growth.
Salary inflation, as well as price inflation, began to increase, but all indicators show that further increases are coming. This was across the board, but particularly in IT and life sciences. Certain skills are experiencing double digit inflation, purely because demand is at an all-time high. Supply of skills by re-training or re-educating staff from sectors that suffered (retail, hospitality, etc.) was slow.
It does present opportunities for SMEs to compete with larger multinationals, as the employee experience has never been more important and the flexibility that SMEs can generally give and the speed by which they can move, can give significant edge.
Remote work obviously continued to increase significantly, and hybrid models seem generally to be the optimum for employees. Tax and legislative issues with working in a different country has slowed this internationalisation, but it does present excellent talent opportunities once it is well planned. Traditional professions, like accounting, HR and legal grew as pent-up demand was evident. In Ireland particularly, construction is very buoyant after the tight Covid restrictions closed many sites in 2021 lifted and the need for housing requires a large increase in activity in the coming years.
So, a year of unprecedented growth in demand for talent, giving challenge and opportunity. The recovery of economies will sustain this growth throughout 2022 but some apprehension prevails that global economic shocks could accelerate recession. So, it is difficult to be over-confident on a medium-term basis. Predictions are difficult but I would estimate that demand will begin to level out and drop late 2022 and return to more “normal” or pre-Covid levels in 2023.
The various Covid strains continue to challenge, but more importantly we hope everyone stays safe and healthy.
Posted by Julia Purcell on 1 February 2022
