The Junior Market Broke Before AI Arrived
Australian graduate programmers are competing against 84 applicants per advertised vacancy. That number is real, and almost none of it is AI. The country doubled the number of people trying to enter tech, then the 2022 hiring boom ended.
Jobs and Skills Australia publishes a table of the country’s highest-employing occupations and how many people apply for each advertised vacancy. Registered nurses get 10.1 applicants. Electricians get 14.0. Software and applications programmers get 84.4.
That is not a rounding difference. It is the highest number in the table, and the occupation sitting closest behind it is receptionists on 69.2.
I went looking for that figure because I kept hearing the same explanation for it. Junior developers cannot get hired because AI now does junior developer work. Every version of the argument I saw took the collapse in graduate hiring as the evidence and AI as the cause, in that order, with nothing in between.
So I spent a while in the Australian education, migration, vacancy and employment data to see whether the causation holds up here.
Australia had a genuine supply shock in the number of people trying to enter technology, followed by a serious demand correction after 2022. Those two things together are already enough to produce a brutal junior market. AI is probably making it worse. The Australian data does not currently justify treating AI as the primary cause, which was a surprise to me.
We Trained Far More People, And Then Trained More Again
The first thing that jumped out was how many people Australia put into the pipeline.
Domestic students commencing an Information Technology course went from 12,347 in 2016 to 21,983 in 2024. The Department of Education’s own summary of the 2024 statistics puts the increase at 91.4 per cent over the past ten years.
Almost nothing else in the university system did that. Domestic commencements in management and commerce, the field usually treated as IT’s rival for the same school leavers, fell from 67,257 to 58,618 across those same years.
The interesting part is where the growth landed.
Students starting IT
Australia, commencing domestic students, 2016 to 2024
Programmer jobs advertised
Monthly average of online vacancies, financial years 2018-19 to 2025-26
Between 2019 and 2021, domestic IT commencements went from 15,098 to 22,552. That is a 49 per cent increase in two years, in an intake that had previously been growing at a few hundred students annually.
That was the pandemic. Borders closed, unemployment jumped, travel stopped, and a lot of people enrolled in something.
Then it flattens. Commencements were 20,127 in 2022, 21,917 in 2023 and 21,983 in 2024. That last step is growth of 0.3 per cent.
A degree takes three or four years. The enormous 2020 and 2021 intake starts graduating around 2023 to 2025.
Which is almost exactly when everybody started saying there are no junior software jobs anymore.
Then Add Everyone Who Came Here To Study It
Domestic commencements are not the whole pipeline. They are not even most of it.
In 2024, Australian higher education providers had 74,605 students commence an Information Technology course. Of those, 21,983 were domestic. The remaining 52,622 were overseas students. In 2023 the split was 21,917 domestic and 49,990 overseas.
So for every Australian starting an IT qualification, roughly two and a half international students start one alongside them.
That is not a recent quirk either. Andrew Norton’s report for the Future Skills Organisation, drawing on the same departmental data, found that commencing international enrolments in IT bachelor degrees increased by more than 400 per cent between 2015 and 2023. He also notes something worth sitting with: international students have outnumbered domestic students in postgraduate IT programs for the entire 2010 to 2023 period.
There is unquestionably a much larger potential pool of entry-level candidates than the domestic numbers alone suggest, and it has been growing faster than the domestic pool for a decade.
The Graduate Outcomes Look Exactly Like Oversupply
The 2024 Graduate Outcomes Survey asks graduates what they are doing four to six months after finishing. For computing and information systems undergraduates, the answers split sharply by citizenship.
| Computing and information systems, undergraduate | Full-time employed | Employed at all |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic | 67.8% | 80.4% |
| International | 43.5% | 63.4% |
2024 Graduate Outcomes Survey, undergraduate outcomes by study area and citizenship status. Domestic full-time employment in this field was 74.4% a year earlier.
International computing graduates are having a harder time than domestic ones, by 24 percentage points on full-time employment. It looks like a very large number of people competing for the same first rung, with a lot of them, domestic and international, not getting onto it. The international cohort is being hit hardest.
The other thing in that survey is worth noting before anyone builds a tech-specific theory on it. Domestic computing graduates fell 6.6 percentage points on full-time employment between 2023 and 2024. Over the same year, architecture and built environment fell 12.1 points, veterinary science fell 7.4, pharmacy fell 7.0, and business and management went from 84.5 per cent to 78.5. The survey’s own framing is that full-time employment declined across most study areas, consistent with general employment trends for the cohort.
Computing graduates are having a bad time. They are not having a uniquely bad time, and whatever is causing it is not confined to occupations a language model can do.
Eighty-Four Applicants Per Vacancy
Which brings me back to the number I started with.
Jobs and Skills Australia built something called a Labour Supply Index, which measures how far an occupation’s applicants per vacancy sits from the national average. Nationally that average was about 27 applicants per vacancy across 2024. Negative index, undersupplied. Positive index, oversupplied.
Registered nurses score minus 17.2, at 10.1 applicants per vacancy. Electricians score minus 13.2, at 14.0. Child carers score minus 18.2, at 9.1.
Software and applications programmers score plus 57.1, at 84.4 applicants per vacancy nationally and 86.0 in metropolitan areas.
Jobs and Skills Australia did not merely observe that programmer vacancies attract a lot of applicants. It formally classified the occupation as oversupplied.
Occupation Shortage Report, March 2025, using 2024 survey and administrative data.
This is not 84 unique unemployed programmers patiently queued behind every advertisement. It is an applicants-per-vacancy measure built from employer survey and administrative data. People apply to many jobs at once, applicant quality varies enormously, and the same person shows up in a lot of those counts.
But the comparison across occupations is done on the same basis, which is what makes it useful. Whatever the measure is doing to programmers, it is doing to electricians too, and the two numbers are six times apart.
That makes the situation fundamentally different from a trade where employers genuinely cannot find anyone. It also means the standard advice to graduates, apply to more places, is advice to add one more application to a pile of eighty.
Demand Really Did Collapse
Jobs and Skills Australia has published a monthly count of online job advertisements by occupation since 2006. For software and applications programmers, the series peaked in March 2022 at 8,753 advertisements. Across the 2021-22 financial year it averaged 7,872 a month.
Across 2024-25 it averaged 3,733. That is a fall of 53 per cent. By July 2026 the figure was 3,049.
The current level is not merely below the boom. It is roughly half the pre-pandemic 2018-19 average of 6,163.
The formal classification moved with it. Software engineer had been listed as being in shortage every single year since the Occupation Shortage List began in 2021. In the 2025 list it came off, along with developer programmer, ICT quality assurance engineer and penetration tester. Software and applications programmers as a group went from shortage in 2024 to no shortage in 2025.
So look at the sequence:
- 2019: about 15,000 domestic students begin an IT course.
- 2020 and 2021: that number jumps by half while the borders are shut and migrant supply disappears.
- 2021-22: companies advertise programmer roles at nearly 8,000 a month, the highest on record.
- 2022-23: borders reopen, international education and skilled migration restart.
- 2023 to 2025: the enormous domestic cohorts graduate.
- 2023 to 2025: vacancies fall by half.
You barely need AI to explain why graduate applications became a bloodbath. That is a textbook supply and demand squeeze, and both sides of it moved at once.
Migration Adds A Layer, But Migrants Are Not Graduates
Net overseas migration went from 538,000 in 2022-23 to 306,000 in 2024-25, falling for the second year in a row. It has come down a long way from the peak, but 2022 to 2024 was extraordinary by any historical standard. Students were the largest single group of arrivals even in the reduced year, at 157,000.
Programmers are not incidental to Australia’s skilled migration system either. In 2024-25 there were 4,221 permanent Skill stream places delivered to software and applications programmers, second only to registered nurses on 5,006. The year before it was 4,243. And the 2021 Census found that two-thirds of people working in the occupation were born overseas, with about 24,000 of them having arrived since 2016.
So migration plainly affects labour supply here. But there is a distinction that most versions of this argument skip, and it changes what the numbers mean.
A thirty-five year old developer with eight years of commercial experience is not competing with a computer science graduate for a graduate program. They are competing for a completely different job.
They are still relevant, though, because of what they do to the decision on the employer’s desk.
Say I need another productive developer. I can hire a graduate at seventy-five thousand, have someone experienced spend a real chunk of their week teaching them, accept low output for six months, and hope they do not leave the moment they become useful. Or I can hire someone experienced at a hundred and twenty thousand who contributes almost immediately.
When the market is full of experienced candidates, the second option gets easier every year. And that quietly removes the incentive to create juniors at all.
This is the apprentice problem with different job titles. Australia can have plenty of trained, experienced programmers and almost nobody willing to train the next generation of them, and there is no contradiction between those two facts. Businesses want productive labour. The social system needs training pathways. Those are not the same incentive and nothing automatically aligns them.
Software Engineer Is Still On The Skilled Migration List
Which raises the obvious question. Why is a country with 84 applicants per programmer vacancy still running an immigration pathway for programmers?
It is, and on two separate lists.
The Core Skills Occupation List governs the Skills in Demand visa and the direct entry stream of employer nomination. Its legislative instrument is currently at compilation number three, dated 7 November 2025. Items 246 to 253 are Analyst Programmer, Developer Programmer, Software Engineer, Software Tester, Cyber Security Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Penetration Tester and the catch-all category. Not one of them carries a caveat.
That compilation date is three weeks after the Occupation Shortage List took software engineer off shortage for the first time since the list began in 2021.
The points-tested visas use a different list again, in an instrument first made in March 2019. Analyst programmer, developer programmer and software engineer all sit on its Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List, which is what makes the skilled independent visa available to them.
The Core Skills Occupation List is not a shortage list, and Jobs and Skills Australia says:
The CSOL is not a prioritised list in any way. This is because there are no limits on how many occupations are allowed to be on the list.
So an occupation can be formally oversupplied and stay on the list without any contradiction, because the list is a permission rather than a target.
That holds up right until you read what JSA said about this particular occupation. In its 2024 report on the list, it placed software and applications programmers in the category it calls a suitability gap, meaning there are enough qualified applicants but employers do not regard them as suitable. Of that entire category it wrote:
increasing the throughput of qualified people may not mitigate skill shortages
Programmers were also in the draft group labelled “targeted for consultation”, which is JSA’s term for occupations where the labour market analysis is less compelling. They went onto the final list anyway, and without the marker JSA used to flag the 133 occupations it was least sure about.
Then timing did the rest. Consultation on the 2025 version opened on 25 August 2025 and JSA delivered its advice to the Minister on 20 October 2025, so the analysis was built on the previous year’s shortage list, back when programmers were still short. I went through the spreadsheet of occupations JSA flagged for scrutiny that round. Of the 278 listed, the technology entries are network architect, ICT support engineer, ICT test analyst, digital game developer, cloud architect, solution architect and cloud engineer. Software engineer was not questioned at all. Eleven months on, the Minister has not acted on that advice and the 2024 list is still the law.
The list is uncapped and permissive, so striking programmers off it would end employer sponsorship, not the flow. In 2024-25 the entire permanent skilled intake for the occupation was 4,221 people, against a workforce of 203,200. And the largest channel of all does not touch the list. The Temporary Graduate visa’s post-higher-education stream requires no nominated occupation and no skills assessment, because it is granted on the degree. Every one of the 52,622 people who started an IT course in 2024 gets two to three years of full work rights afterwards, whatever any occupation list says.
Programmer Employment Is Still Going Up
If AI were destroying the Australian programmer occupation, you would expect the number of employed programmers to be falling.
It is not. Jobs and Skills Australia’s occupation profile, drawing on the ABS Labour Force Survey to February 2026, puts employment at 203,200 with annual employment growth of 13,700.
For comparison, the government’s own occupation profile in early 2022 reported 153,700 people in the occupation as at November 2020, and 147,400 in 2019. The same page carried a projection: 199,800 by 2025.
The profession hit that projection. Slightly late, and after the most volatile five years the labour market has had in decades, but it hit it.
| What is happening | Direction |
|---|---|
| Total programmer employment | Up, about 13,700 a year |
| Programmer vacancies | Down 53% from the 2021-22 average |
| Applicants per programmer vacancy | 84.4, the highest of any large occupation |
| Graduate full-time employment in computing | Down 6.6 points in a year |
| Domestic IT commencements | Up 91.4% over ten years |
| Overseas IT commencements | 52,622 in 2024, against 21,983 domestic |
| Junior hiring | Terrible |
Seven things that are all true at once, which is the whole problem with a single-cause explanation.
That is not the pattern I would expect from AI eliminating programmers. It is much closer to a workforce that kept expanding while labour supply expanded faster than marginal hiring demand.
Which is a completely different diagnosis, and it explains how seniors and juniors can be living in two different markets. Suppose the country has 180,000 experienced programmers, 25,000 potential new entrants a year, and employers who want to create maybe 10,000 genuine entry-level positions. There is no contradiction in firms still competing hard for senior developers while graduates send two hundred applications and hear nothing.
It is the tradie situation. “We cannot find qualified electricians” does not imply we would love to employ every first-year apprentice.
So Where Does AI Fit
I do not think AI is innocent here, and I would be arguing against my own daily experience if I said otherwise.
There is a specific list of work that used to be ideal for juniors. Simple CRUD endpoints. Basic tests. Boilerplate. Small bugs. First-pass documentation. Straightforward SQL. Mechanical refactors. Research and summarising.
An experienced developer with a coding agent gets through most of that now. So when someone asks whether the team needs another person, the honest answer from the senior may genuinely be not yet, give me another six months with the tools.
That is a real effect on demand, and I would expect it to grow.
This is the main concern. We have not yet seen the full effect of the AI disruption for juniors.
Why Causation Matters More Than People Are Admitting
The strongest version of the AI argument comes out of the United States. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab has been tracking payroll records and finds that employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations now sits well below where it would be had it tracked their less-exposed peers, while experienced workers show no equivalent gap. Their August 2026 update puts that gap at 19 per cent. Importantly, they find the adjustment happens through reduced hiring rather than through people being fired, and they find no evidence of widespread displacement across the economy.
That is good evidence of a phenomenon. It is not automatically evidence of a cause, and the researchers are careful about the difference in a way the people quoting them frequently are not.
The response I keep encountering is that causation does not really matter, because the rung has disappeared either way.
I think that is exactly backwards.
AI is the accelerant. It does not look like it lit the fire.
If graduates cannot get hired because the number of candidates doubled while the 2022 hiring bubble burst, the market rebalances eventually, the way markets do. Then this is just a cycle we have been through in every industry for decades.
If graduates cannot get hired because AI can do graduate work, then increasingly capable AI makes the problem progressively worse, forever, and the entry-level job is structurally gone. In this scenario we need to take this as a warning for the entire job market.
Those two sides produce completely different forecasts, different advice to an eighteen year old choosing a degree, and different policy.
But my fear is that we have one story of too many graduates now moving into the AI story.
Sources
- Selected Higher Education Statistics, 2024 student data, Department of Education, for the domestic and overall Information Technology commencement figures. The 2024 Section 1 tables carry the by-field breakdowns used here, and the equivalent tables for earlier years supply the 2016 to 2023 series.
- Higher education students in IT, engineering and management and commerce, Andrew Norton for the Future Skills Organisation, for international enrolment growth and IT course attrition.
- 2024 Graduate Outcomes Survey international report, QILT, Table 4, for the domestic and international employment rates in computing and information systems. The national report has the year-on-year falls across every study area.
- Occupation Shortage Report, March 2025, Jobs and Skills Australia, for the Labour Supply Index and the applicants-per-vacancy figures. The 84.4, 10.1 and 14.0 comparisons are in Table 8 of the accompanying worksheet.
- Internet Vacancy Index, Jobs and Skills Australia, four-digit occupation series, for the monthly advertisement counts for Software and Applications Programmers. The financial-year averages and the 53 per cent fall are my own calculation from that series.
- 2025 Occupation Shortage List key findings and the 2025 Occupation Shortage Drivers report, Jobs and Skills Australia, for the occupations that moved out of shortage and the agency’s comments on AI adoption.
- Software and Applications Programmers occupation profile, Jobs and Skills Australia, for current employment and annual growth. The 2020 employment figure and the 199,800 projection come from an archived version of the same profile from March 2022.
- Annual net overseas migration falls for the second year in a row, Australian Bureau of Statistics, for the migration and student arrival numbers.
- 2024-25 Migration Program Report and the 2023-24 report, Department of Home Affairs, for permanent Skill stream places by occupation.
- 2021 Census data shows Australia going high tech, Australian Bureau of Statistics, for the two-thirds overseas-born figure and the 24,000 recent arrivals.
- Migration (Specification of Occupations, Subclass 482 Visa) Instrument 2024, compilation 3 of 7 November 2025, for the Core Skills Occupation List entries. The points-tested lists are in Migration (LIN 19/051), compilation 5 of 28 March 2026. Home Affairs explains which visa uses which list on its skilled occupation list page.
- 2025 Core Skills Occupations List consultations, Jobs and Skills Australia, for the statement that the list is not prioritised, the consultation dates, and the targeted for consultation spreadsheet.
- 2024 Core Skills Occupations List key findings report, Jobs and Skills Australia, for the suitability gap classification, the quoted line about throughput, and the draft groupings.
- Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485), Post-Higher Education Work stream, Department of Home Affairs, for the absence of any occupation or skills assessment requirement.
- SEEK data reveals AI boom could create more entry level jobs, reporting SEEK chief economist Blair Chapman’s analysis of 10 September 2026, for the early-career share of job ads by AI exposure.
- Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and their August 2026 update, for the United States young-worker results.
John Croucher builds practical software and AI systems for Australian businesses, focused on solving real problems with measurable outcomes.