Author :
Diana Sharma, Mission Director | Mission Ready
Twice in the last month someone has forwarded me an article saying the New Zealand job market is recovering. Twice someone else has sent me one saying nobody under 25 can get hired.
Both were accurate. That is the problem.
So we are starting something. Every quarter, we will put the numbers in one place, tell you what we think they mean if you are trying to get into tech or trying to hire into it, and note what we got wrong last time. Every figure will have a source at the bottom. Where we are guessing, we will say we are guessing.
Here is the first one.
The demand side has genuinely turned. SEEK's August report, released last week, had job ads up 0.6 percent on the month and 9.7 percent on the year, which now marks 21 consecutive months of growth. Auckland had its strongest monthly rise in over four years.
Now the other half. Unemployment hit 5.6 percent in the June quarter, the highest in more than a decade. Underutilisation, which is the broader measure and the more honest one, jumped to 13.8 percent. Around 8,000 more people were in long-term unemployment than a year earlier.
And the age split is brutal. Unemployment for 15 to 19 year olds is 25.3 percent. For 20 to 24 year olds it is 12 percent. Every other age band is a long way below that.
Both things are true at once because demand and competition are rising together. More roles are being advertised, and more people are applying for each one. Applications per ad have now climbed for two straight months, the sharpest uptick in 18 months.
There is a cost-of-living squeeze sitting underneath all of it. The OCR has been lifted twice and sits at 2.75 percent, with inflation at 4.1 percent in the June quarter [Stats NZ CPI June 2026 quarter release], driven largely by fuel. Advertised salaries rose 2.6 percent over the year to August, which is well short of prices.
The honest summary: it is a better market than last year and it is still a hard market to enter. If you have been applying and hearing nothing, the data agrees with you. That is not a character assessment.
This is the number that changed most since we last looked, and it is not the one you would expect.
Datacom's 2026 State of AI Index has 91 percent of New Zealand organisations using AI in some form, up from 87 percent last year and 66 percent the year before. Adoption is basically settled.
But 81 percent are still in the exploratory or implementation stages. Only 15 percent are scaling it across the organisation. And the share using AI to transform core operations has gone backwards, from 8 percent to 4 percent. Only a third say returns exceed costs.
Now the bit that matters for anyone reading this. When those organisations were asked what is stopping them scaling, the single most common answer was lack of internal capability or skills, at 20 percent. Second was employee concern or fear of job displacement, at 18 percent.
So the constraint on AI in New Zealand right now is not the tools, and it is not the money. It is people who can take a tool and change how work is actually done. Fifty-nine percent of organisations now employ or plan to employ dedicated AI talent, up 25 points in a year. Two thirds have run AI skills training in the past twelve months.
That is a training problem with a hiring problem attached to it, which is as close to a mandate as our sector gets.
AI skills are now mentioned in 4.0 percent of all New Zealand job ads, up 93.3 percent year on year. In ICT roles specifically it is 17.6 percent, by far the highest of any category, followed by marketing and communications at 9.8 percent.
The fastest-growing named skills are the interesting part. In the year to July, AI ethics and governance mentions rose 368.8 percent, agentic AI 118.6 percent, and generative AI 77 percent. SEEK's read is that AI is moving out of being a specialist technical skill and into general business practice, particularly at senior levels.
Read that list again. Two of the three fastest movers are about controlling AI rather than using it. Governance, guardrails, knowing when the output is wrong. That is judgement work, and it is the thing our employer partners have been telling us they cannot find.
On ICT hiring more broadly, I want to be careful. SEEK does not publish a monthly ICT-only breakdown in its public release, so the year-on-year figures circulating for tech specifically come second hand. What the specialist recruiters say, consistently, is that ICT ads are up year on year and the mood has turned, while being clear it is not a return to the hiring of 2021. Absolute IT's 2026 survey has availability of talent as the top hiring challenge for tech employers, which is the same thing our partners tell us: more roles, and far more targeted decisions about who fills them.
Here is the number I keep going back to. SEEK now scores occupations by how exposed their tasks are to automation. Ads for high-exposure roles are 0.1 percent lower than a year ago. Medium and low exposure roles are both still growing.
SEEK is careful to say AI is probably one factor and unlikely to be the only one, and I would repeat that caution rather than dress it up. But the direction is consistent with what we hear from employers every week, and with what is happening offshore, where entry-level technology hiring has fallen sharply in the UK and in the US. Those are overseas numbers and I am flagging them as overseas.
I do not have clean New Zealand data isolating junior tech hiring specifically, and I am not going to borrow an overseas number and imply it is ours. What we do have is a 25.3 percent unemployment rate for 15 to 19 year olds, recruiters reporting thinner graduate pathways, and partners telling us the six-month training runway they used to offer a new graduate has largely gone.
The entry-level job has not disappeared. It has moved up a rung. It now starts roughly where it used to arrive after six months, which is what our employer partners have been telling us and the whole reason our programmes are built around mentored work with real industry partners rather than around exercises.
Four things, in order of how much difference they make.
Be AI literate in the way employers actually mean it. Not that you use the tools. Everybody uses the tools. That you can tell a correct output from a confidently wrong one, and explain how you checked. That is what the governance hiring signal is telling you.
Finish something small and be able to walk someone through it. Problem, approach, what you would do differently. Very few candidates can do this and it separates them in about four minutes.
Get your work critiqued by a practitioner before you are on a payroll. The gap between people who have been reviewed properly and people who have only been marked is visible immediately.
Plan for the first role to pay less than you want. Advertised salaries are running behind inflation. That is uncomfortable and it is better to know now than in month two.
We will do this again in November and then in February, by which point these figures will be movements rather than snapshots, which is when they start being genuinely useful.
If you are weighing up a move and want the version of this that applies to your actual circumstances, talk to a Mission Advisor. Bring the constraints, not just the ambition.
Own what's next.
Ngā mihi, Diana
Every figure above links to its source on first mention. Full list, with the date each was published.