The U.S. technology sector has now recorded employment growth in each of the past five months, according to analysis by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information technology (IT) industry and workforce.
Technology companies added 16,600 jobs in April, a combination of technical and non-technical positions, data in the “Employment Situation” report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals. (#JobsReport). So far in 2021 tech industry companies have added 60,900 workers.
Employers across all sectors of the economy reduced their hiring of IT workers by an estimated 234,000 positions. This was the first decline after four consecutive months of employment gains.1 For the year IT occupation employment has increased by 72,000 positions.
Employer job postings for open IT positions held steady in April, increasing by a modest 1,690 over March, totaling nearly 309,000.
“As employers increase hiring activity, expect more tech workers to explore their career options,” said Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA. “In a competitive labor market, companies will need to be even more diligent in their approach to work practices and corporate culture in retaining tech talent.”
All five tech occupation categories showed solid employment growth last month, led by new hiring in IT services and custom software development (+6,200), information services, including search engines (+3,400) and telecommunication (+3,300), the category’s best performance since January. Computer and electronic products manufacturing (+2,100) and data processing, hosting and related services (+1,600) were also in positive territory.
The latest job posting data shows that California, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Florida had the largest month-over-month increase in IT job postings. Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles, Dallas and Sacramento had the strongest performance among metropolitan areas.
CompTIA’s analysis also shows that a number of other regions have seen strong demand for IT workers so far this year, including Charlotte (18,543 IT job postings), Baltimore (16,182), Detroit (16,050), Raleigh (14,712), Tampa (13,542), St. Louis (12,092), Portland, Ore. (11,990) and Columbus, Ohio (11,102).
Industries with significant numbers of job openings for IT professionals in April included professional, scientific, and technical services, finance and insurance, manufacturing, information, retail trade, public administration, health care and social assistance, educational services, and transportation and warehousing.
Employers continue to seek out software and application developers, advertising 93,500 open positions last month, more than the next four occupation categories combined. Still, demand for core IT talent remains solid, with employers advertising open positions for IT support specialists (26,000), systems engineers and architects (22,900), systems analysts (20,400) and IT project managers (19,100).
The CompTIA Tech Jobs Report is available here.
