We have done a staggering amount of work across the IT services and the digital services spectrum, especially in this specialist service provider market where you're talking about high end skills like cloud computing, data analytics, generative AI. One question investors are always concerned about is the talent landscape. Because these businesses are so dependent on talent, they're always concerned about if there's going to be enough talent for them to acquire as they buy these IT services companies.
So there are three dimensions to assess this talent landscape. The supply of talent, the demand for this talent, and the wage growth. As covid hit, visa approvals dropped by seventy five percent, job vacancies went up by twenty percent, and as a result wages increased by nine percent. For some roles, we observed wage growth of up to thirty percent. Post COVID though, visa approvals have now increased by one hundred and sixty two percent but still sitting way below pre COVID levels. But demand has dropped by twenty percent and wage growth is back to pre COVID levels of approximately three percent.
COVID nineteen related disruptions have started to normalize with migration now heading back to pre COVID levels. The near to medium term outlook for skilled migration is positive due to favorable migration policy settings for permanent and temporary workers.
The Australian government has set the twenty twenty three twenty four permanent migration planning levels to pre COVID nineteen settings. Furthermore, the government will introduce a new four year skills in demand temporary skilled worker visa to improve pathways to residency, in particular for specialist skills earning greater than one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars per annum.
From a demand standpoint, job vacancies have reached pre COVID levels. Wage growth during COVID for roles like DevOps engineers, cloud engineers, and app developers grew between ten and thirty percent, but these wages have now plateaued post COVID.
Overall, the talent market has now softened and pressure on talent acquisition is expected to ease off.
