The 10 jobs that landed the biggest pay increases last year – The Australian Financial Review

Project engineers, customer service workers and market research analysts are among the occupations that landed the biggest pay rises last financial year.
Research by global consultancy Mercer shows IT specialists, industrial mechanics and other types of engineers received large salary bumps too, but experts say the pay increases are set to moderate amid the slowing economy and relief from skills shortages.
Aurecon chief people officer Liam Hayes says engineers are always in high demand because Australia does not produce enough of them.  Elke Meitzel
Based on a survey that canvassed more than 1200 Australian organisations and covered close to 425,000 employees, Mercer’s Total Remuneration Survey found that employers increased base salaries by a median of 4 per cent in 2022-23.
This was above the 3 per cent increase they had planned to hand down, as the tight labour market forced them to beef up salaries to attract and retain employees who held the upper hand in negotiations.
However, the report found that some roles were given much heftier pay increases.
Across the board, a quarter of employees landed pay rises of more than 7 per cent, and this was even higher in the mining and metals industry.
One in three employees (33.6 per cent) in mining received a pay rise greater than 7 per cent, compared with 26.5 per cent of employees in the second-placed non-financial services sector, 25.7 per cent in third-placed high tech, 25 per cent in other non-manufacturing, 24.7 per cent in logistics, and 24.1 per cent in other manufacturing.
And salaries rose by more than 10 per cent in the 10 roles that landed the biggest pay increases.
These included entry-level project engineers (19 per cent); senior paraprofessional roles in customer relationship management (18.3 per cent); entry-level DevOps engineers, or IT professionals who integrate and automate the processes between software development and IT operations (17.9 per cent); and entry-level marketing research analysts (13.8 per cent).
Engineering and technology roles each accounted for three of the 10 jobs that landed the biggest pay increases last financial year.
Liam Hayes, chief people officer at engineering consultancy Aurecon, told The Australian Financial Review that labour shortages across the engineering profession had eased slightly since the peak of the worker squeeze last year.
The company’s staff attrition rate was now 20 per cent lower than in the 2022 financial year, he said.
But Mr Hayes said engineers were always in high demand in Australia as the country did not produce enough of them. The global energy transition meant water engineers and those with experience in battery storage and wind-generated power were especially hard to find, he added.
“There’s certainly still a need for us to look for those skills offshore because there’s not enough of those particular high-demand skills in Australia,” Mr Hayes said.
He told the Financial Review that Aurecon had increased salaries in line with market conditions to attract and retain employees.
He said the opportunity to do meaningful work and experience career growth at Aurecon had also played an important part in attracting strong candidates – as had the company’s flexible work policy, which encourages some office attendance but essentially lets each team design its own schedule.
Looking ahead, employers are expected to implement lower pay increases next year as they scale back their hiring plans in response to higher interest rates and slower economic growth, according to Cynthia Cottrell, the leader of Mercer Pacific’s workforce consulting and products business.
“They’re starting to divert their resources and their total rewards thinking to retention as opposed to just attraction,” Ms Cottrell said.
Mercer’s Cynthia Cottrell says employers are focusing more on retaining existing staff than hiring new ones. 
Offering flexible working, and learning and development programs, are two ways employers can improve their staff retention, the report says.
Other retention strategies include higher internal minimum wages, incentive pay, referral bonuses, retention awards and more paid time off.
Consistent with recent reports from recruiters and employers, Mercer’s survey also suggests that Australia’s skills shortages have eased slightly since their recent peak.
Sixty per cent of the surveyed organisations said they had difficulty hiring or retaining employees in certain roles this year – up from 43 per cent in 2021, but down from 64 per cent last year.
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