Surprisingly bright outlook among small IT business owners

Stephen Withers
Monday, 12 January 2009 10:46

Opinion and Analysis

If you work for a small business, then your employment prospects for the next 12 months might not be as bad as you may fear.

44 percent of the sample were sole traders that don't intend to hire staff, so we can leave them to one side.

Among the remainder, 35 percent expect staff numbers to remain stable, 14 expect to take on more people, and only 4 percent foreshadow staff cuts.

Recasting those figures as percentages of employing small businesses, over 92 percent expect to maintain or increase staff numbers.

When we look at a breakdown by industry, the IT sector is slightly above average, with 16 percent expecting to hire more employees, vs 14 percent overall.

But if you think your next job may be in a small business, be prepared to network - finding new staff through friends, family and existing employees is still the most common method, with more than twice as many owners using this means as any other.

And don't give up on newspaper ads - small businesses are still more likely to advertise vacancies in the press than online.

However, there are signs that rose-tinted spectacles may be in use by business owners.

When owners were asked about the outlook for their industry, the story was very different. Only 17 percent expect things to improve. And ICT is the least optimistic sector, with a mere 7 percent expecting things to get better.

Among the survey's other findings, the proportion of small businesses with a web site remains flat at 40 percent. This is practically the same as in the March and June 2008 surveys, though there was a dip to 35 percent in September.

Curiously, 45 percent have registered a domain name. Presumably some of those are using it for email only.

The survey was carried out by AMR Interactive for MYOB during November and December 2008 and involved a sample of 1385 small business proprietors, 42 of them in the ICT sector.