Bureau of Labor Statistics reports big drop in tech jobs
Employment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor for the month of July, as well as its employment statistics comparing July 2007 versus July 2008, indicate a significant decline in information technology employment.
It took only two short sentences on page 4 in the bureau's six-page Economic News Release to spell out what most IT people may have already realized: IT jobs are getting harder to come by. "Employment in the information industry declined by 13,000 in July and by 44,000 over the past 12 months.
Telecommunications lost 5,000 jobs in July," according to the bureau.
The statistics from the Bureau reinforce a recent survey of top CIOs who indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff over the coming year. According to M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO at Janco Associates, an IT staffing research firm, the IT employment trend for the last 18 months indicates a slow decay in demand for IT professionals driven by the convergence of three factors.
It appears that organizations are in cost-containment mode and not aggressively looking to expand technology. At the same time, there is no new must-have technology that is forcing companies to reengineer the way they are doing things, he says. "The only exception is Web 2.0-based technology," Janulaitis notes, but its small growth is not enough to offset the overall decline. Plus, Web 2.0 investments also seem to have peaked: "There was a slight increase in demand [for Web 2.0 technology] six to eight months ago, but that atrophied as the economy slowed down," he adds
Some of the lost jobs have gone to outsourcers, with companies increasingly outsourcing the lower to middle management layer of IT. The other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff's workload. This is evident in where companies are targeting their IT cuts: the so-called level 2 employees in IT. "If someone is an assistant or level 2, not quite a trainee but not a star, they are being cut back or not being hired," says Janulaitis. He expects the IT employment picture will stay the same until after the election, when everything gets "settled out."
» posted by abennett
InfoWorld
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses
By Markus Jakobsson, Zulfikar Ramzan
Published Apr 6, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Symantec Press series.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures
By Peter Thermos, Ari Takanen
Published Aug 1, 2007 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
