IT Job Growth Hits Record Pace, More than Offsetting Drop in Telecom Hires

U.S. tech sector employment is on a roll, despite continuing cuts in telecom, adding more than 56,800 new jobs for IT pros since Jan. 1 —and 100,000 new jobs are expected by year’s end.

That’s according to Janco Associates. Some 8,500 more new jobs have been created compared to the same seven-month period of 2018.

Although there still are more openings than qualified professionals available to fill them, the candidate pool is large enough for recruiters to find qualified candidates, it said.

Janco’s Victor Janulaitis

Janco has seen a slight increase in attrition rates due to more active recruiting and the compression of pay grades for some key positions.

“Overall hiring for IT professionals remains at a record-setting pace,” said Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis. “The rate of increase in the number of new IT positions is up slightly with between 8,100 to 8,800 new IT jobs created in each of the last three months. A number of CIOs we interviewed, as part of the release of our Mid-Year 2019 IT Salary Survey, did voice a note of caution. They were not quite sure what the impact of the looming trade war [with] China would be and the lack of approval for the new U.S./Canada/Mexico trade deal.”

The elimination of 5,100 jobs in telecom last month was offset by solid hiring in the employment category of technology services, custom software development and computer systems design, according to CompTIA‘s analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Employment Situation report.

“Despite the telecom losses and some softness in job posting data, it was a reasonably solid month for tech,” said Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s executive vice president for research and market intelligence. “Digital transformation is an ongoing process, where the mix of investment, skills requirements and business alignment are never static.”

CompTIA’s Tim Herbert

Telecom has experienced nine consecutive months of employment declines. So far in 2019, an estimated 22,800 jobs have been eliminated.

Most of the new positions created this year are beyond those of traditional business analysts and programmers, according to Janco.

“With the emphasis on getting data closer to those who need it, applications being developed are mobile, and designing user interfaces that comply with the latest security and privacy mandates is a priority,” Janulaitis said. “New skill sets are being recruited. Legacy processing is taking a back seat.”

With the current growth of the IT job market and most enterprises planning on expanding the impact of technology on both external and internal operations, the outlook for IT professionals continues to be the brightest it has been in several years, according to Janco.

Looking ahead toward potential future hiring, software and application developer positions continue to be the most in-demand occupation companies are looking to hire for, with 78,300 job postings in July, according to CompTIA. Computer user support specialists (20,100), computer systems engineers and architects (16,800), computer systems analysts (15,000) and web developers (13,500) rounded out the top five list of IT occupation job postings last month.