IT Jobs Outlook Healthy Despite Some Pain Points in Q1

By Nathan Eddy

About 35 percent of IT leaders surveyed said hiring rose in the first quarter for full-time and contingent employees, TekSystems reported. In a November poll, 47 percent forecast first-quarter increases for full-time staff and 46% predicted gains in hiring for contingent workers.

Heading into 2014, 62 percent of those polled said they expected their IT budgets to increase, yet just 47 percent now see this to be the case, TekSystems reported.

Tech skills in fast-growing markets is much sought after. IT leaders now rank security, business intelligence and big data experts among the top-three most difficult positions to fill. Business analyst remains the fourth most difficult role to fill, the TekSystems survey revealed.

Although IT budgets are tight, the percentage of respondents who are confident in their IT department’s ability to satisfy business demands has increased from 66 percent at the end of 2013 to 72 percent at the end of the first quarter, TekSystems reported.

So far this year, IT leaders’ over-optimism regarding budgets appears to have affected hiring, said TekSystems’ Research Manager Jason Hayman. It will be interesting to see how conditions develop—either falling in line with or skewing further away from expectations—and how organizations will adapt, he said.

Dice’s tally of Labor Department data shows the tech unemployment rate fell during the first quarter to 2.7 percent, from 3.5 percent in last year’s first quarter but is still above the record low of 1.8 percent in the second quarter of 2007. (December 2007 was the first month of the last recession.)

“Consistent confidence has been hard to come by in this recovery,” the Dice report said. That affects the rate at which people leave jobs. The number of IT pros quitting their jobs in the first quarter rose from low levels.

Tech consulting added 17,200 new positions in the first quarter, Dice reported. On average, consultants earned $42.17 per hour and worked 38.8 hours per week in February—both records

More companies are turning to consultants “to help them harness the new tech age: analytics and data, infrastructure flexibility, and making internal and external applications easy to use,” Shravan Goli, Dice president, said in the report.