2022 Biggest trends in the data job market in Hong Kong

2022 has just begun and we are already reaching one of the busiest times of the year for the job market, the Chinese New Year period.

So what can we expect from this year for the data professional in Hong Kong?

Will the job market still be affected by the Covid? Does the trade war between US and China still operate and affect the economy?

Does the landscape still changing?

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How have we started 2022?

As an intro, I'll start by mentioning a rough reminder about these last couple of years.

If 2020 was the most impacted year from an economic and job perspective, 2021 has been quite good in terms of new jobs related to Tech and Data.?From April to December we barely felt any break from the data job market.

The break usually happens close to the holidays season like summer or Christmas.?

But since nobody could travel, the business didn't stop, except slightly in December were Hiring Managers cleared their annual leave.

This leads us to now, 2022

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Despite the Omicron variant reaching Hong Kong, January hasn't slowed down and more and more candidates only had one thing in mind to start their job hunt, wait a couple of weeks before they get their year-end bonus.

Hence, I can foresee that this year will be a total war when it comes to the data job market.

And here are my takeaways:

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1. Every sector will reach maturity and hire Data people

The consulting sector was the first to massively hire Data people back in 2020 when multinationals were too scared to hire internally. Financial Services have sped up last year, but this year even sectors like Retail, Luxury, FMCG, E-commerce, Property are hiring new data staff.

Drawing a landscape where the largest multinationals are hiring and where the competition will be fierce in Q2 among all the candidates.

It's good news if you are job-seeking since you can get several offers and bad news for Hiring Managers as it will be more difficult to compete with other companies.

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1. Data Job seekers won't stay more than two years in their job anymore

A direct consequence of the previous one is that the data job market will become tenser. Data engineers, data scientists, data architects, data analysts, and data governance professionals will be more often approached and hence be influenced to switch jobs more often.

Aligning with a trend that we can observe in Singapore where data professionals tend to stay 1.5 years in their job before switching to another one.

HR from companies will tend to become more tolerant for what they considered before like "jumpy candidate", especially for hands-on data engineers.

Companies will have to change their strategy and give real career prospects to their data employees to retain them in a mid-term perpective.

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1. Cloud exposure and MLOPS/deployment at scale will become soon a must

With the rise of large-scale enterprise platforms/projects. Many multinationals will expect their data engineers to have exposure to at least one Cloud provider (often Azure or AWS). Also, expect their Data scientists to not just build models but also be working closely with data engineers to be able to deploy the models at scale.

The upcoming skills to master are those from the software engineer world, to cope with a mobile/app customer strategy.?

I would recommend getting some interest in Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.

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1. Small companies and startups won't be able to keep up on the salary side very soon

In the past, very attractive because of the technological aspect and the work-life balance, the small players if they don't generate that much margin on their project will lose their most talented data staff.

Firstly because of lack of career perspective/evolution and very soon because they will lose the war of the salary offers.

Although, this kind of company is still recommended for expats arriving in Hong Kong for their first job in the city.

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1. Big players from Financial Services are coming

With the full economic recovery of most of the Financial Services, they are now able to dedicate more time to improve both their platform and invest in R&D Data Science/Machine Learning.

Driven by a customer-first strategy, they are massively focusing on their business digitalisation.

From social listening, customer behavior analysis, increase of cross projects with Marketing.?

All of them want to know how their customer interacts with their products in this new digital era of Covid.

May I also mention the buzz around Digital Assets, Crypto, Blockchain, NFT/Gaming, and other Fintech???

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Most of the companies that I have just mentioned here above don't have the maturity to hire at-scale data professionals.?

At least not in Hong Kong. They will start to hire here and there data engineers/data platform.

But if the investment remains steady, we might see the emergence of several new data scientist team in these new Financial companies.

by the end of this year.

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