Australia’s labor market is facing a stark new divide: employers are ramping up advertised salaries at the fastest pace in nearly a year, but the benefits of this pay growth are out of reach for most of the country’s workforce. Fresh data from leading employment platform Seek reveals that advertised salary growth re-accelerated to 0.4% month-on-month in March, bringing annual growth in advertised pay to 4.1% — the highest annual increase recorded since July 2022.
Despite this seemingly positive trend, Seek’s chief economist Blair Chapman notes that the wage bump will do little to ease cost-of-living pressures for the vast majority of Australian households. Most workers are unable to immediately switch jobs to capitalize on the higher advertised salaries, leaving them stuck with stagnant wages even as they grapple with soaring fuel costs, rising mortgage repayments, a cooling national economy, and growing anxiety over job stability.
The latest employment figures also signal a softening overall labor market: the total volume of job advertisements fell by an additional 0.4% in March compared to February, marking a 2.9% decline year-on-year. Applications per new job posting also dipped 0.5% during the month, even though the share of active workers seeking new roles remains far above pre-pandemic levels.
Alongside rising pay offers, a clear shift in hiring requirements is emerging across all industries: employers are increasingly prioritizing candidates with artificial intelligence skills. Seek’s data shows that job advertisements referencing AI skills have surged 75.2% over the past 12 months. The trend is most pronounced in information and communications technology, where AI mentions in ads have jumped 11.4%, followed by marketing and communications (5.5% growth) and science and technology (4.7% growth). Even industries with historically low AI integration have seen a 1.3% rise in demand for AI skills this year.
Chapman points out that AI-referencing jobs still make up less than 2% of all Australian job advertisements, and recent global economic uncertainty around AI development has led to a slight slowdown in growth. “We can expect this increased uncertainty to have employers feeling a little more cautious in the near term until a clearer view of the situation emerges,” he explained.
But new analysis from Australia’s national science agency CSIRO eases fears of mass AI-driven job displacement, even amid recent high-profile layoffs at major Australian tech and telecom firms including Atlassian, WiseTech, and Telstra. The agency’s multi-year study of hiring patterns across thousands of Australian companies found that firms that have adopted AI are actually advertising more new roles than companies without an AI strategy, with these positions requiring a broader mix of skills rather than fewer.
Dr Claire Mason, lead of the CSIRO’s workforce and productivity research team, said the data reshapes common narratives around AI and work. “AI isn’t replacing workers,” she explained. “Australians need to be working with and harnessing AI, and learning how to use technology to augment their human intelligence. The big shift is not that jobs are disappearing — it is that jobs are changing.”