The IT job market in July was dominated by demand for analyst programmers and software engineers, accounting for up to a quarter of the 22,941 IT positions advertised in Australia for that month, according to the July IT Talent Index of ICT recruiter Best People Solutions.

The most in-demand skill areas of programmers and engineers was in C#, .Net and VB.Net which took the lion's share of all programming jobs advertised (39 percent), followed by Java (21 percent) and ASP-related positions (11 percent).

Business analysts, support specialists and systems administrators followed the programmers in demand, each boasting around 8 percent of advertised positions.

Windows systems still dominate the sys admin market at 58 percent of jobs in that sector, with Unix, Linux and Cisco-skilled staff contributing the remainder in roughly equal proportions.

In the age of privacy law reforms and increasing attention around securing the information that flows across corporate networks, security specialists were the least advertised positions at less than one percent of all IT jobs advertised.

According to Best People Solutions, the overall IT job market decreased by 5.06 percent in July, due largely to a 6.9 percent decrease in permanent positions offset by a three-quarter percent rise in contract positions.

"With the new financial year now in swing this could be worrying signs for the IT market in Australia. However, it could also point to differing methods of recruitment and less reliance by organisations on traditional Internet job boards for finding people," the report said.

NSW fell slightly below the 50 percent mark for all IT jobs in Australia, with a drop of 8.79 percent in permanent positions and 2.43 percent in contract positions.

"The largest increases have been seen in the contract market in Tasmania and the ACT at 60 percent and 32.69 percent respectively. It is worth remembering that these two areas represent only 5.2 percent of the overall market."

Database developers and administrator roles decreased by 3 percent over July, with SQL and Oracle-related positions dwarfing all other skill areas.

HTML and Flash remain the most in-demand multimedia developer skills, whose sector decreased by 7 percent over July.