If you’re thinking of starting a search for a new banking job in Singapore, it’s first worth considering whether your efforts will be worthwhile.
If there are a lot of other people looking for work in your field now may not be a good time to enter the job market.
To help you decide, we compared the amount of Singapore-based vacancies with the number of local CVs on our database across 18 key finance job functions to produce the chart below. We restricted the resumes to those updated within the past year, indicating that they belong to people interested in finding new jobs.
If you’re in one of the sectors towards the top of the chart, your job search could be fairly straightforward because you will face the least competition from other candidates. If you’re at the bottom, you might want to stick with your current job.
Quants, for example, will have a comparatively ‘easy’ time finding a new job in Singapore – there are just seven Singapore-based candidates on our database for every available job in the city state. Continued demand for analytical skills and a high academic barrier to entering the quant profession have created a perpetually tight job market.
The chart shows that skill shortages in compliance (eight CVs per vacancy) have not gone away, even as the near-decade-long recruitment boom in the functions starts to tail off as banks reach their desired headcount levels.
More surprisingly, given recent offshoring to markets like India and the Philippines, operations also features towards the top of our ranking. Many of the current back-office vacancies in Singapore are senior and/or in specialist areas like client onboarding where banks find it more difficult to recruit new staff.
Unlike other sectors, the high ranking for hedge funds on our chart doesn’t indicate an ‘easy’ job search – it reflects the small pool of people with hedge fund experience already on their CVs. If you’re looking for a hedge fund job, you’ll also be up against elite candidates with investment banking backgrounds.
The bottom of our list shows the impact of recent redundancies in banking, which have reduced vacancies and increased the number of unemployed candidates. Fixed income and commodities – two sectors particularly affected by job losses at global banks – have high ratios of 31 and 33 respectively.
It’s also bad in equities – you’ll be competing with 23 other candidates if you look for a job in Singapore now, according to our data. Several banks, notably Credit Suisse and Barclays, have culled or trimmed their equities teams in Asia over the past two years as their struggle for profitability.
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