Tech Employment Regains Momentum

IT employment recorded positive gains across four key workforce metrics in October, according to CompTIA, a suburban Chicago trade association. The organization identified these metrics as sector employment, occupation employment, the unemployment rate and employer job postings.

Citing the monthly U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, CompTIA says 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. Additionally, IT occupation employment expanded by an estimated 142,000 positions for the month. This figure accounts for technical occupations among employers across all sectors of the economy.

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. Job gains also occurred in tech manufacturing and data processing, hosting and related services.

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%.

Channel Impact^®
The data suggest that employers are slowly beginning to express faith in the economy by virtue of the uptick in employment growth.