Public servants working in, or looking to move into, government technology now compete for fewer advertised roles and for jobs where artificial intelligence, broader judgement and systems thinking are rapidly replacing traditional coding skills.
Layered over a major shift in public service recruitment is a complete reframing of what technical work looks like in the age of AI, where literacy in generative tools is quickly becoming a baseline capability across both specialised and generalist roles.
Conventional software titles were being rebranded or bypassed by specialised roles such as AI engineers and automation engineers, alongside new compliance jobs like AI governance leads to manage risk.
Being able to work with AI mattered as much as building it, with job descriptions in communications, policy and administration increasingly specifying generative AI tools.
For Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) chief executive Chris Fechner, navigating this shift was less about mastering any single tool and more about how public servants thought.
"Part of what I think is really essential, and even more so now in the world of AI and reasoning engines, is critical thinking, and the ability to decompose into smaller areas is absolutely essential," Mr Fechner said.
"The more that we rely upon AI, the more critical thinkers we're going to need to know when AI is not giving us the right outcomes."
Mr Fechner said that as AI tools became embedded across workflows, the premium was shifting from narrow technical depth to judgement, adaptability and systems thinking.
"Digital has always been a really high-change environment ... things have happened much more rapidly in the digital space than they have in accounting, in legal and even in medical," Mr Fechner said.
"You actually have to be relatively comfortable with change to be really effective in digital leadership roles, and you have to be comfortable explaining the reasons for those changes."
Mr Fechner said that one of digital's historic failures in government had been vertical thinking, treating customer engagement, management, records and reporting as separate stacks.
Future roles would increasingly require people who could connect the dots across those systems, he said.
An AwardedTenders analysis showed digital vacancies in the public service gazette contracted by 25 per cent in 2025. Yet tech roles grew as a share of total vacancies, rising from one in four in 2018 to nearly one in three by 2025.
Specialised infrastructure roles saw explosive growth, with cloud and DevOps positions growing 15-fold and data engineering growing 13.5-fold since 2018, while network engineering surged by 76 per cent in 2025.
By contrast, traditional roles in software development, data analytics and quality testing dropped between 25 and 47 per cent.
Defence recorded 1667 digital vacancies between 2023 and 2025, followed by Home Affairs with 1276.
Cyber security emerged as the standout skill cluster, with 52 federal agencies advertising five or more cyber-related roles.
The analysis showed 62 per cent of digital advertisements concentrated at APS level 6 and executive level 1.
DTA workforce data showed more than half of new digital hires enter at APS 5 or below, pointing to an internal bottleneck in developing junior staff into mid-career specialists.
This mid-level squeeze created perpetual vacancies, such as Defence ICT service manager positions advertised 36 separate times and ATO IT application developer roles advertised 45 times since 2011, offering APS 6 salary bands ranging from $97,816 to $112,312.
At smaller agencies like the Federal Court of Australia, an APS 5 IT service support officer role was readvertised in every calendar year since 2020, totalling 38 times across a decade.
Mr Fechner said digital capability shortages were a complex problem that did not have a fast answer and it would take multigeneration or multidecade solutions rather than quick hiring blitz.
For public servants looking to future-proof their careers, demonstrating AI fluency, critical oversight and systems-level judgement was rapidly becoming the price of entry.
