The most sought after skills in banking and finance in Singapore

When hiring professionals in the banking and finance sector, what skills do you look for?

According to the latest report by JobTech, across the entire banking and finance sector, 20% of online job postings seek candidates with skills including proficiency in Microsoft Office, sales, communication skills, interpersonal skills, understanding of technical protocols, and good practices.

Separating the skills into three categories (technical skills, soft skills/traits, and domain knowledge), the report shed light no the top five in-demand skills in the industry.

Additionally, JobTech noted the emergence of 10 additional domain knowledge areas and 16 additional technical skills that showed up in the 1Q 2017 listing. The emerging domain knowledge areas sought by employers included: robot operating system, relational database, safety compliance, business operations, and system engineering.

With the increasing use of technology in the banking and finance sector, the report also revealed the emerging technical skills recruiters are on a lookout for when it comes to technology jobs. These include VSphere, Eclipse, RedHat, Apache Struts, and Phishing.

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Despite the less than ideal economic situation, JobTech’s job monitoring technology recorded a more than 40% increase in online job postings when  1Q 2017 is compared with 4Q 2016.

An increase of more than 800 unique online job postings in the Singapore banking and finance sector has been observed in 1Q 2017; over the 2,000 unique online job postings captured in 4Q 2016.

Going by the average number of unique job postings per month, the first quarter of this year recorded an average of slightly over 950 online job postings per month. While the last quarter of 2016 recorded an average of slightly over 650 online job postings per month.

"While there is a possible seasonal effect due to hiring patterns in the beginning of the calendar year over the end of the calendar year; a negative signal was also observed from the number of online job postings from January to March 2017 for the banking and finance sector, with March recording the lowest number of online job postings in the first quarter of 2017," JobTech's report noted.

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