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Dated: Aug. 13, 2004
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The good news is that U.S. companies hired 2.1 million IT workers last year.
The bad news is that they fired 2.6 million, reducing the over all IT workforce by about 5 percent to 9.9 million workers, according to results of anational IT work force study released by the information technology associationof America.
At the top of companies' 2001 of layoff list were technical support workers,such as help desk and customer service center employees, whose ranks werereduced by more than 911,000. Other losing job categories included databasedevelopers and software programmers/engineers, which lost 445,000 and 487,000jobs, respectively.
The groups that lost the fewest number of jobs were digital mediaspecialists; technical writers and enterprise systems support workers.
Result of the ITAA study were based on interviews with 532 hiring managers atcompanies with more than 50 employees, interviews were conducted in February andmarch of this year.
According to ITAA president Harris Miller, hiring managers rated specificindustries and technical experience as the top factors they considered wheninterviewing IT job candidates. Less important were technical certifications andgeneral work experience.
This doesn’t bode well for the millions of graduates from college;technical study and certification programs that are now entering the IT jobmarket.
Compounding this group ‘s woes is the finding that companies are targetingthe help desk and customer service as two areas to cut jobs. Theses same twoareas are traditionally the biggest providers of entry-level IT position.
"Entry-level positions have been reduced significantly since the beginningof 2001.” Said Scott Melland, president of Dice Inc., an online job postingservice. "Opportunities are fewer”, he added.
Despite the grim layoff numbers, hiring mangers in ITAA’s survey also saidthey expect to create about 1.1 millions IT jobs in the next year. But due to aso-called skill imbalance, they expect about 600,000 of these jobs to remainunfilled.
There are indicators that the job market is returning, said Joanne Peterson,president of Abator information service inc., an IT recruiting firm Pittsburgh,but she is not willing to buy in to the ITAA’s numbers yet.
Peterson said many listings carried on online job boards are often double ortriple dips. Various recruitment agencies often post the same job as theycompete to get the position filled and capture the fee paid out by hiringcompanies.
Still, she said, the markets seem to be coming back, and she thinks thesecond half of the year might bring some real relief to job seekers. " If Ihad to guess, really guess, I would say the end of September,” Peterson said.
Regarding the ITAA’s assertions that as many as 600,000 jobs will gounfilled due to the lack of qualified candidates, Peterson is not buying that atall. "I think we could staff every real job that is open with people who arenot working,” Peterson said. "I don’t think we need to go India to get ajob filled.”
That’s all for this week!
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