Tech Employment Regains Momentum With Positive Movement in Key Areas

October Job Gains Recorded in IT Sector Employment and IT Occupations, CompTIA Analysis Shows

Information technology (IT) employment recorded positives across four key workforce metrics in October – sector employment, occupation employment, the unemployment rate and employer job postings, according to analysis by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the global technology industry and workforce.

The monthly U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation (#JobsReport) shows that employers in the nation’s technology sector added an estimated 14,200 new jobs in October. The total includes technical and non-technical positions on the payrolls of U.S. tech companies. Tech sector employment has seen positive gains in three of the past four months.

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U.S. tech firms added 14,200 new workers in October, while IT occupations across all industries grew by 142,000 jobs.

Additionally, IT occupation employment expanded by an estimated 142,000 positions for the month¹. This figure accounts for technical occupations among employers across all sectors of the economy.

The BLS also reported the unemployment rate for IT occupations at 2.8% in October, down from 3.5% in September. In comparison, the national unemployment rate stands at 6.9%.

Employer job postings for IT occupations were up nearly 14,200 for the month, totaling nearly 239,000 postings in October.

“It is reassuring to see consistency in this month’s data with all four metrics pointing to momentum in tech employment,” said Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA.

October job growth within the tech sector was led by the addition of 15,800 positions in the IT services and custom software development category, an important indicator of small and medium-size business activity. Job gains also occurred in tech manufacturing (+ 3,500) and data processing, hosting and related services (+ 800).

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Job postings for open core IT positions totaled 238,815 in October. Postings for software and application developers (72,100) accounted for nearly one-third of the total. Other in-demand occupations included IT support specialists (22,000), systems engineers and architects (18,800), systems analysts (14,800) and IT project managers (14,000).

The percentage of IT job openings that specifically offered remote work or work from home (WFH) as an option was 23% in October, roughly in line with the year-to-date average of 22%.

Demand for tech talent continues to be broad-based with employers across industry sectors in hiring mode, led by professional scientific and technical services (41,252) finance and insurance (20,549), manufacturing (18,027) and information (13,644).

Washington, D.C. (17,414), New York (14,036), Dallas (10,958), San Francisco (10,306) and Los Angeles (9,169) were the top five metropolitan areas with the largest numbers of IT job postings in October. Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas and Washington recorded the best month over month gains in job postings.

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