Research & Innovation

Recruitment consultancy Morgan McKinley has released a comprehensive analysis of pay and benefits across a wide range of professions in Ireland, finding that demand for talent is highest in areas like software development, data analytics, research and development and digital marketing.

Figures in the Morgan McKinley 2014 Salary & Benefits Guide come from a sample of over 25,000 placements across 15,000 employers. The data was gathered in 2013 and job titles analysed were broken down by location and experience levels. The benefits noted include pensions, health insurance and annual leave.

The complete report can be downloaded from Morgan McKinley.

Salary boost for UX consultants

“For many professionals, Ireland has rebounded strongly,” said Trayc Keevans, director of inward investment at Morgan McKinley Ireland. For example, in less than three years, user-experience (UX) consultants’ salaries have doubled €42,000 per year to €85,000.

“A UX consultant in Dublin can expect to receive between €23,000 and €42,000 per annum in the first three years of his career and this is similar to Waterford where the same job earns between €22,000 and €38,000. Impressively, after over five years, the same developer can expect to earn between €65,000 and €80,000,” said Keevans.

Pay scale varies from city to city

Overall, the figures reveal that professionals in Dublin receive between 8pc and 15pc more than those in identical jobs in Cork, Limerick and Waterford.

“However, the degree of difference in pay is significantly less across the most in-demand positions such as software development, engineering, supply chain and human resources,” commented Keevans.

A sample of the salary analysis by role, experience and location conducted by Morgan McKinley (source: 2014 Salary & Benefits Guide)

Who’s in demand?

The guide also lists the top three most in-demand positions per discipline. In the science sector, regulatory affairs specialists, audit and compliance managers and QC analysts top the chart, while the engineering sector is seeking quality engineers, validation engineers and 3D design engineers.

The most-wanted professionals in sales and marketing are increasingly digital roles, with digital marketing mangers and directors topping the list, followed closely by digital communications managers.

“We are experiencing the emergence of a strong demand for skilled professionals in more recent emerging disciplines such as digital marketing, research and development (life sciences) and data analytics,” said Keevans. “We anticipate that salaries for professionals with the requisite skills for these areas may rise in 2014 as the demand will exceed supply in the short to medium term.”

IT’s most-employable candidates

The IT most-wanted are Javascript UI front-end developers, QAs and testers in a development environment, and dev ops engineers.

The report claims that, overall, Ireland has an exceptional global talent pool across high-demand skill sets such as iOS (Xcode and Objective-C), Android, Windows Phone, HTML5, PhoneGap, Titanium, Javascript, Python, Ruby and PHP.

As far as recruitment goes, IT employers are are increasingly looking for blended skill sets with a mixture of development and support in high demand.

Life science benefits

Life sciences and financial services employers were found to offer the most attractive benefits to professionals.

Keevans also noticed with positivity a return to hiring in the SME sector, calling it “the most significant uplift in five years and a strong indicator of a return to confidence in the economy post bail-out exit.”