Tech Job Postings and Employment Remain Steady Despite Ease-Up on Hiring

Tech employment and new job postings have remained in forward-march mode, even as employers scaled back on hiring in February. This is according to analysis of the latest labor market data by CompTIA.

According to CompTIA, technology companies added 5,300 new workers in February. That makes it the 15th consecutive month of employment growth for the sector. Even further, in the first two months of 2022, tech industry employment has increased by an estimated 20,600 positions.

Slowed, But Steady Tech Employment

Consulting firm Janco reports that in 2021 hiring for IT pros was on a record pace, with 213,000 new IT jobs created.  In early 2022, IT hiring was still booming. However, since the invasion of Ukraine, this has slowed or paused completely. This is, of course, thanks to inflation, sanctions and shutdown of normal international commerce.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, analyzed by Janco, there are now more than 3.8 million jobs for IT professionals in the U.S. For 18 months in a row, there has been an increase in the number of jobs in the IT job market. What does this mean? Essentially, the hiring of IT professionals, while no longer white hot, is still robust.

Positive Gains

According to CompTIA, tech occupations throughout the economy grew by 1,000 positions. There have been positive gains in five of the past six months.

CompTIA’s Tim Herbert

Employer job postings for tech occupations approached nearly 388,000 last month, an increase of more than 50,000 from January. Job postings over the past three months exceeded 1 million. 

“The record-level of employer job postings for the month and a pause in actual new tech hires is a clear sign of the ongoing labor supply problem,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “Employers want to hire more tech workers but can only do so when there are workers to hire.”

Positions in High Demand

Openings for software developers and engineers are in highest demand, according to CompTIA. In addition, employers are looking for IT support specialists, IT project managers, network engineers and architects, and systems engineers and architects. Openings for positions in emerging technologies or roles requiring some level of emerging tech skills are cited in 32% of all core IT job postings.

Within industries, professional, scientific and technical services (60,263); finance and insurance (54,736); and manufacturing (42,198) advertised the most tech job openings.

Specifically within the tech sector, February hiring was paced by IT services and custom software development (+4,500). Also, the computer and electronic products manufacturing (+3,100) categories performed well. Those gains were offset by staffing rollbacks in telecommunications (-1,500), and data processing, hosting and related services (-1,000). Hiring in the category of other information services, including search engines, was essentially flat (+200).

Read the full CompTIA tech jobs report here.