Asia is facing a shortage of employees who can fill technical roles: Seek Asia

Asia may be struggling with labor shortages post-pandemic, but Peter Bithos, CEO of job portal operator Seek Asia, said it is not the same as North America’s “Great Resignation”.

Instead, the Asian workforce is short of people who have the skills to fill technical roles in companies, Bithos told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

“What we’ve seen is a major reconfiguration of the types of talent that are needed” in the workforce, he said. This is reflected in the increase in tech features on Seek’s platforms, which Bithos says is up 66% year over year.

Despite layoffs at tech companies, almost “every sector of the economy outside of technology” is hiring tech workers, Bithos explained. Tech jobs across Asia remain robust and are “very much in demand,” he added.

A search on job portals JobsDB and JobStreet, which are operated by Seek Asia, showed 57,902 available jobs in the information technology category in six Asian economies: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.

The number of applicants for those tech positions is up 14%, which Bithos says could be caused by layoffs in the tech sector and people feeling “confident” enough to look for work as the pandemic comes to an end.

Dismissed workers still have many jobs available to them, though those roles may not be at a “pure tech” company, Bithos said.

Technology jobs make up nearly half of Singapore’s fastest-growing job titles over the past five years, LinkedIn said in its 2023 “Jobs on the Rise” list. These include jobs such as cybersecurity engineer, back-end developer and artificial intelligence engineer.