CompTIA: Tech Sector Employment Grows Amid Pullback in Overall Tech Occupations

Technology sector companies in the aggregate added workers last month while employers throughout the economy reduced tech occupation staffing, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics by CompTIA, a tech industry association based in suburban Chicago.

Within the tech sector, employers increased employment by 12,643 positions, according to CompTIA. Employment growth was led by new hiring in IT and custom software services and systems design (+10,400) and cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting (+5,800).

However, tech occupations throughout the economy declined by 189,000 positions. The unemployment rate for tech occupations rose slightly to 2.1%, moving directionally with the increase in the national unemployment rate to 3.8%.

“The usual caveats of monthly fluctuations in labor market data apply,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The seesawing between strong and lagging tech jobs reports is undoubtedly confusing, but the overall macro trend of growth in the depth and breadth of the tech workforce remains steady.”

Employer job postings for future tech hiring totaled nearly 208,000 in August, a slight decline of 1.4% from the previous month. Job postings for information security analysts increased 19% from July to August, to more than 12,000 postings. Other in-demand occupations include software developers, tech support specialists, computer systems analysts and data scientists.

Denver, Washington, Phoenix, Tampa, Philadelphia, and Baltimore led metropolitan areas with the largest increases in the number of tech job postings from July to August.

Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills accounted for 23% of all tech jobs postings in August. Within emerging tech job postings, 37% were associated with artificial intelligence (AI). California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia had the highest numbers of AI-related job postings.

Channel Impact^®
The data show continued strength within the industry while tech-related hiring outside of the industry is having trouble gaining momentum.