Australia's Most In-Demand Jobs Don't Match Its Best-Paid Roles, Randstad Data Shows

The top five most in-demand jobs in Australia, according to new data from recruitment company Randstad, are sales assistants, office clerks, registered nurses, GPs and medical officers, and people working in advertising, PR and sales. The figures were released to news.com.au as the year closes with mass redundancies and growing anxiety about artificial intelligence.

The rest of the top 10 is similarly hands-on: labourers, construction managers, retail workers, mechanics, and aged and disability carers. Randstad general manager Madeline Hill said the vacancies cluster where people skills and organisational skills are needed, the things she says AI can't do. Customer service and customer experience roles, she said, are where demand is increasing.

That demand doesn't track pay. Only one occupation, construction management, appears on both lists. It sits eighth among the best-paid jobs, at an average salary of $220,000. Hill said demand for construction and other trades is being driven by a rise in AI infrastructure investment, such as building data centres, which needs engineers, plumbers and specialists. Jobs are being lost in some areas, she said, but where industry is growing there are vacancies.

The top of the pay list holds few surprises: surgeon at $500,000, anaesthetist at $450,000, psychiatrist at $350,000, financial investment manager at $300,000 and airline pilot at $250,000. Corporate lawyers, IT systems architects, construction managers, mining engineers and data scientists average between $200,000 and $250,000 a year before bonuses. Hill sees room for strong growth in data science, given demand for tech specialists across industries. She isn't sounding alarms for corporate careers either, arguing that banking and media still involve complex conversations and decisions that affect people.

Tamara Black, a Canberran who works in disability care, said the job offers flexibility and human connection. She also said turnover can be high, with many people doing it as a second or third job. "Whether it's aged care or disability, there's always going to be a need for someone to be supported," she said, calling it "a bit of a hot commodity."

The Reserve Bank's chief economist, Sarah Hunter, spoke this week about early signs of AI's effect on local hiring. She said labour indicators may mask disruptive displacement effects and pointed to emerging signs of weaker hiring in advanced economies. An RBA graph of job ads in AI-exposed occupations since ChatGPT's release in November 2022 shows a notable drop into early 2023, a recovery to pre-ChatGPT levels in 2025, and another downward trend in 2026. Workers aged 15 to 24 have faced lower employment than older workers, depending on how exposed their jobs are to AI. Hunter warned the benefits are unlikely to be distributed evenly, and that some workers face a difficult adjustment that will weigh on household income and spending.

The broader market looks strained. The unemployment rate rose to 4.7 per cent in September, with more than 39,000 jobs lost since August, and economists expect it to pass 5 per cent. Sarah Donegan, managing director of Samuels Donegan, said Australia is in a "redundancy season" and expects more before Christmas. Her agency recorded a 250 per cent spike in jobseeker registrations in October, and nearly half its registrations since March came in the past two months. Recruiter Tammie Ballis called the 2026 market a "dumpster fire" and said many people made redundant can't get rehired, while graduates with degrees in finance, HR, marketing and cybersecurity are "not getting a look in."

Meanwhile, workers are holding still. ABS data shows 25 per cent planned to change jobs in the first half of 2026, but only 7.2 per cent did, down from 17 per cent in the second half of 2025. Hill still reads the demand for human-centred work as good news. The next signals to watch are the unemployment figures and whether the pre-Christmas redundancies arrive.