The tech employment market is improving — albeit gradually – according to the latest data cobbled together by TechServe Alliance, a national trade association representing the IT services industry.
In July, the IT sector added 9,700 jobs in the U.S., a 1 percent improvement from the same month last year, to a total of 3,875,000 positions. For the year, TechServe’s report (PDF format) says more than 63,000 IT jobs have been created so far this year.
“Despite a generally anemic employment environment, IT employment continues to show strength,” Mark Roberts, TechServe Alliance’s CEO, said in the report. “With July’s growth, IT employment has increased in each of the last seven months.”
Be that as it may, the report found that the number of new private-sector IT jobs actually declined slightly from last July, a clear indication that many of the new positions have been created the Obama administration’s concerted effort to overhaul the federal government’s IT systems.
“While IT employment would not be immune should the recovery derail, at present we remain very bullish on continued growth in the sector for the foreseeable future,” Roberts added.
The report jives with other statistics compiled in the past few months by vendors, IT consultants and employment staffing firms that found companies are starting to hire more IT staffers, particularly for cloud-computing and virtualization projects left on the backburner during the economic meltdown of the past three or four years.
In June, a Consumer Electronics survey revealed that unlike years past, a solid 45 percent of organizations are increasing their IT budgets this year and only 27 percent are planning to cut spending — down from 49 percent in 2009.
Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.