Findings are based on actual salary offerings posted between April 2017 and November 2017 on CareerJunction, one of SA’s leading online job boards, where over 20,000 jobs are posted monthly. The review focuses on the top 10 most sought-after sectors in South Africa and reveals regional pay gaps for many sectors across Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
The sectors covered include:
- Architecture & Engineering
- Medical & Health
- Building & Construction
- Warehousing & Logistics
- Information & Communication Technology
- Finance
- Marketing
- Sales
- Admin, Office & Support
- Manufacturing & Assembly
Gauteng remains tops
High demand often goes hand in hand with high prices. This phenomenon is also seen in the job market where professionals are offered higher salaries in Gauteng compared to other regions for the same job, due to the high economic activity and therefore high demand for labour. According to the latest salary review by CareerJunction, professionals residing in and around Gauteng consistently earn above the national average across all 10 sectors analysed. Professionals residing in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal mostly seem to earn salaries slightly below average while in some sectors salaries fall far below average.
In the Western Cape, for example, finance professionals can earn up to 24% below average, followed by construction workers with earnings up to 19% below average and sales professionals with earnings up to 13% below average. In KwaZulu-Natal, professionals in marketing, construction and engineering can earn between 15% and 20% below average while those in the fields of ICT, warehousing & logistics and sales can earn between 23% and 30% below average.
Best paying jobs
Best-paid sectors across the 10 analysed sectors are the engineering, financial and ICT sectors. Best paid workers within these sectors include civil/structural engineers and technical/business architects as well as financial, IT and plant managers, where salaries range between R48,000 and R69,000 per month for professionals at management and senior management level. Skills of this sort are not easy to find on the South African job market and, as a result, companies are willing to pay higher salaries to professionals with these skill sets.
ICT skills remain among SA’s most sought-after skill sets, particularly software development.
Growing salaries
The building & construction sector, as well as the warehousing & logistics sector, saw a jump in salary offerings over the last year, particularly senior-level professionals within these sectors. Building foremen, construction/demolition equipment operators, logistics managers and warehouse packing & packaging professionals saw the highest jump in salary offerings with annual increases of over 43%.
Year-on-year, a slight increase in salary offerings is evident across most ICT occupations too. However, salaries for systems & network administrators as well as IT project managers saw a considerable jump of more than 20% during this period.
On the other hand, salaries for marketing and sales professionals have decreased over the past year.
