High-tech Sector Job Growth Continues to Outpace Overall Employment

January 21, 2013

IT jobs growth decreased slightly in December, but even in a slow month, the sector was able to outpace the overall U.S. employment market.

A recent TechServe Alliance study found that while high-tech employment shrunk by 600 jobs in December, to approximately 4.2 million, IT jobs achieved a 2.23 percent year-over-year growth for 2012. This marked the second straight year the sector grew, as 2011 saw a 2.3 percent increase.

Although high-tech employment stagnated slightly toward the end of 2012, it wasn’t because of a lack of available jobs. In fact, recent studies have found that for certain positions, thousands – even tens of thousands – of positions remain unfilled, largely because they are so new and lack qualified candidates.

“While the secular trends for strong IT employment growth remain in place, we need to get through the current period of pervasive uncertainty,” said Mark Roberts, CEO of TechServe. “Once the uncertainty dissipates, I fully anticipate we will see robust growth in IT employment throughout 2013 and beyond.”

IT jobs in transition
Randstad recently projected the hottest jobs in 2013, two of which reside in the high-tech sector.

The “third platform,” which consists of new technologies relating to cloud computing, enterprise mobility, social media and big data analytics, will account for a substantial portion of IT jobs growth.

Organizations across nearly every industry are rapidly adopting cloud-based, social and mobile solutions to benefit both their employees and their customer base. At the same time, all three of these technologies have contributed to the rise of big data analytics.The study also projected software developers to be in high demand in 2013, as the cloud, mobile and social applications markets continue to mature.

Gartner recently projected that big data analytics – which is being driven by the growing popularity of cloud computing, social media and mobile solutions – will produce 4.4 million IT jobs worldwide by 2015.