IT unemployment at its lowest level in years

April 11 2005     Page 5 of 5

After a number of false starts in recent years, this is the first stretch of several months of sustained hiring, says Kevin Knaul, executive VP of the IT and telecommunications practice group at Hudson, a staffing and outsourcing company. Companies are "spending more on IT talent to tackle IT projects" that had been shelved or delayed for several years, Knaul says.

Of eight major IT job categories the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks, unemployment has been lowest among database administrators (1.8%) and network and system administrators (2.9%) on average over the past four quarters.

Network and data-communication analysts fared the worst (5.2%), followed by support specialists (4.5%) and programmers (4.1%). The number of unemployed IT pros for the 12 months ended March 31 stood at 131,000, the lowest since third-quarter 2001, when it was 112,500. Still, some of what feels like an improvement is just relative to how tight hiring had become. Companies have been working with skeleton staffs the past few years, so some of the hiring is just "playing catch-up," Knaul says.

But it's certainly a changed environment when a contract programmer like Trujillo, whose job will continue to be among the most threatened by offshore price competition, feels optimistic that some companies see the difficulty in outsourcing. "They can't outsource some portions of the [development] process," he says, so they're hiring to get it done.

IT pros know they haven't seen the last of uncertainty and global competition. They just hope new jobs at good pay aren't a fleeting phenomenon.

Source: Information Week

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