Boom times for local software design industry

Statistics New Zealand has released data showing the number of jobs in the computer systems design (CSD) industry grew by 78 per cent between 2000 and 2010.

That equated to 28,200 workers, contributing about 1.3 per cent to New Zealand's gross domestic product by 2010.

While the CSD industry was high-tech, it was still very reliant on labour, said Zoran Salcic, an University of Auckland professor of Computer Systems Engineering.

"People must be involved to make these systems and and they are usually very customised," he said.

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"And computer systems are always prone to errors and bugs. So, you need people to fix those problems."

Industry Trends

The number of self-employed workers in the CSD industry grew by 3,100 in the decade leading up to 2010.

That was a huge proportion of the 3,700 new self-employed people in the national workforce in that same period.

Salcic did not expect to see the industry flattening out any time soon.

"I believe it will go along a similar path in the next decade," he said.

"There will be changes because of technology but there will still be a lot of manual work."

According to Statistics NZ, the industry could also boast to being one of the most prolific product innovators in New Zealand last year.

"The high-tech nature of the computer systems designed allows the industry to innovate at a high rate," said the report.