Report: IT Services Jobs Expected to Keep Improving

A recent report says September saw a significant improvement in IT services jobs, according to Vero Beach, Fla.-based Foote Partners.

The IT industry analyst firm tracks data in the five segments of technology that the Department of Labor provides: communications, computer peripherals, management technical consulting, computer systems design and data processing/hosting.

Foote is particularly impressed by IT services numbers, saying that 400 to 500 jobs were gained in September and 2,500 jobs were gained since the beginning of the year, while the majority of the technology job market continues to lose jobs for all of 2009.

“This is only the second time since January that we’ve seen this kind of behavior in national labor statistics,” observes David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners. “In the time our firm has been closely monitoring the five IT bellwether job segments reported in the DOL statistics–we started right after the financial industry meltdown last October–these segments have posted collective job losses of between 3,000 and 11,000 jobs each month, including 4,300 jobs in August. But in July and September there have been net gains of 7,400 and 2,600, jobs respectively.”

Recent research on technology jobs by GovInfoSecurity.com finds small IT services gains not to be anything significant and not a trend in the positive yet. On recent tech job employment, GovInfoSecurity had the following to say:

“Still, there was no good news in the IT numbers. In the past year, some 100,000 IT workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. And the size of the IT workforce–those holding jobs and the unemployed seeking IT work–fell to below 4 million for the first time in five quarters. Annualized, IT employment stood at 3,775,000 last quarter, with 198,000 out of working and hunting for jobs.”

So, yes, IT services has seen a small gain of 2,500 jobs in 2009, but as the only bright spot for the year, that is not a whole lot.