Contracting in 2023, IT Employment Effectively Flat in December
Alexandria VA, Jan 10, 2023 – TechServe Alliance, the national trade association for the Technology Staffing and Solutions Industry, reported that IT employment was flat in December 2023, going down a mere 0.06% month-over-month. Over the past year, IT employment contracted 1.67%, resulting in a loss of 90,000 positions. By contrast, the Engineering sector inched up 0.18% last month compared to November 2023, and posted a year-over-year job growth rate of 1.76%, adding 48,700 jobs during the same period.
“As we begin a new year, the IT employment landscape is not easily distilled to a single narrative,” said Mark Roberts, CEO of TechServe Alliance. “While demand for IT professionals remains soft in some sectors, other areas of the economy are ramping up. With the IT unemployment rate at 2.4% (Q4) considered to be “full employment” (albeit higher than the 1.9% in Q3), tech talent remains constrained in high-demand skill sets such as cybersecurity, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. While some of the fog has lifted around the prospects for the economy in 2024 and buoyed optimism, I believe demand for IT talent is going to continue to range widely based on region, industry, and even between companies in the same sector,” observed Roberts.