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."
