🚀Gender Diversity and Job Trends in Australia's Ad Tech Sector

Job vacancies within Australia's digital advertising and ad tech industry edged up from 4.5 per cent to 4.6 per cent for 2024. Job openings are lower than the previous year due to sector-wide reductions in force, which lowered the population base According to IAB – 2024 Industry Talent Report today.

The Revelations:

• Over 75% of the jobs on offer today prefer candidates with 1-5 years of experience. This has the power to consolidate the widely reported juniorisation of the advertising workforce. The most in-demand market segment favours candidates with 3-5 years of experience.

• More than 60% of companies are looking to make modest increases to staffing levels, while only 11% expect to make a slight decrease in the workforce. This general sense of cautious optimism is carried through, with further reflections this year telling us that companies have now started to plan for AI to improve productivity without necessarily impacting current staffing levels. This is a shift from 2023 when most companies in a range said they thought AI actually might directly lead to a reduction in people in their teams.

• The average salary increase in the last year averaged 3.8%, a slight drop from the witnessed 4.2% increase in the previous year. However, this increase in rising digital advertising specialists resulted in a drastically high talent cost, thereby aging Australia a premium job market with higher employee costs.

"The digital advertising industry and the ad tech talent market have been weathering the current of ongoing global and local layoffs for the last 12 months. It's positive to see increased optimism for very modest staffing level increases now held by well over a half of the industry surveyed," said Gai Le Roy, IAB Australia CEO.

Other Insights:

• Women in senior management roles drop marginally to 34% (from 38% in 2023). However, we continue to see significant shifts in gender representation across the wider industry as follows:

• Female representation for commercial (45% of industry headcount) improved over last year from 49% to 53%.

• Females in product, which moved over the last couple of years from 36% in 2021 to 48% in 2024.

• Even though men still dominate tech and engineering jobs, the number of female employees increased from 13% in 2022 to 22% in 2024.

• Almost half (48%) of organizations anticipate that most staff members will be in the office three days a week.

• 22% of organizations reported an increase in the number of their part-time staff employees over the past two reporting years.

Why it matters:

These data seem to indicate trends toward gender diversity in fields that until recent years have been mainly the domains of males. It can also be seen in terms of flexible work schedules being offered to employees, as the demands and preferences of employees have now seemingly changed.

Bottom Line:

Finally, the organisations are egging on to make a difference in gender diversity and flexibility at work, showing a change in the work environment to one that is in all inclusiveness and friendly to all employees. These are changes that signify that a general cultural transformation regarding the recognition of diversity and work-life balance has occurred in the organization.

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