IT Employment Trends
Redfish is seeing competition for key technology roles, which we discuss in Executive Recruiter, Andy Nacsin’s article “Winning the Tech Talent War”. Hiring and job postings are continuing to grow overall as evidenced in recent reporting on IT jobs.
The TechServe Alliance just published its IT Employment Index for June, showing an increase of 132,800 (up 3.39%) from June 2010. Overall in Q2 of this year the number of IT jobs has increased, as it had since December 2009, however the month of June slipped slightly by 300 from the month before. IT employment is at 4,051,200; an increase of approximately 133,000 jobs since June 2010. Indeed.com reports that Information Technology job postings have increased 44% over July 2010 (8% over last quarter), and clicks on those jobs have increased 7% since July 2010. “The fact that total employment for telecommunications, data processing, information services, and system design sectors has risen by 58,300 jobs (seasonally adjusted) in the last 12 months is a good sign.” Said CEO of Janco, Victor Janulaitis. Janco’s recent salary survey indicates a small rise for IT professionals. The telecommunications sector had negative hiring, shedding 28,400 jobs since July last year, whereas the computer systems design and related services sector has seen positive hiring of 71,000 jobs in that period. The total mean compensation for all IT professions in 73 job categories that range from CIO to data entry operator increased .35% to $77,873, which puts overall compensation back to January 2008 levels, said Janulaitis. The data is gathered from approximately 800 firms.
Accenture recently released their Technology Vision 2011 report which discusses three technology trends reshaping the business environment: Data Distribution, Decoupling, and Analysis. The Cloud is already widely in use in terms of data storage and backup. Data is dispersed throughout the cyber universe as are services and management of that data. This underscores the need for master data management, security and identity management. The decoupling of data and access to that data is arriving; software data can be separated from the software application, layers from entities, promoting agility and flexibility. Analytics permeate all consumer behavior. Decision making and business processes can harness analytics to drive customer intelligence and business process optimization, consumer services and threat detection.
What does this mean in terms of IT job opportunity trends? Overall enterprise and analytics skills, analytics integration and planning abilities will be strategic. Cloud deployment and security know-how as well as SaaS/PaaS planning and implementation skills that will allow companies to increase functionality and flexibility. Strategic IT to decouple applications from infrastructure. Security will continue to change and become more complicated; risk management professionals, as well as PR and customer service will be key in this area. User interface and experience is going to become more critical in terms of competitiveness. Data management continues to be paramount; data utility, ease of use and the ability to slice and dice in various contexts and for different uses will climb in importance.
Further reading:
IT Employment Grows in the Second Quarter; Pauses in June
IT employment picture improves slightly – up 2.14% in the last 3 months
Accenture Technology Vision 2011 – The Technology Waves That Are Reshaping the Business Landscape