Asia faces a shortage of able-bodied workers for technical positions: look for Asia

Asia may be experiencing a shortage of workers after the pandemic, but Peter Bethose, CEO of job portal operator Seek Asia, said it was different from North America’s “big resignation”.

Instead, Asia’s workforce is short of people with the skills to fill technical roles in companies, Pethos told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

“What we’re seeing is a significant reshaping of the types of talent that are needed” in the workforce, he said. This is reflected in an increase in listings for tech roles on Seek platforms, which are up 66% year-over-year, according to Bithos.

Bethos explained that despite layoffs at technology companies, “nearly every sector of the economy outside of technology” is hiring tech workers. He added that tech jobs across Asia remain strong and “demand is very high”.

A search of job portals JobsDB and JobStreet, operated by Seek Asia, showed that 57,902 jobs were available under the IT category across six Asian economies: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.

The number of applicants for these tech roles rose 14%, which Bithos said could be driven by layoffs in the tech sector as well as people feeling “confident” enough to look for work as the pandemic draws to a close.

Laid-off workers still have many jobs available to them, Bethos said, even though those roles may not be in a “pure-tech” company.

Technology jobs make up nearly half of the fastest growing job titles in Singapore over the past five years, linkedin in the list of “rising jobs” for 2023. These include jobs such as cyber security engineer, back-end developer, and AI engineer.