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Dice, a career Website for technology and engineering professionals, issued its monthly report on the number of tech jobs available in the United States, which according to the company’s data stood at 82,867 as of July 1, with full-time positions making up 50,591 spots and contract positions occupying 35,331 positions. Part-time openings stood at 1,647, according to the report.
Based on the number of jobs posted by ZIP code on Dice as of July 1 and the change as compared with the same period a year ago, the New York/New Jersey area added the most jobs, with 9,707, a 17 percent rise. The Boston area, which ranked fifth overall in number of jobs added (3,283), boasted the highest percentage in growth (43 percent). In the second spot for number of jobs added was the Washington, D.C./Baltimore region, with 7,847 jobs added, representing a 6 percent growth rate.
The third spot was occupied by Silicon Valley with 5,350 jobs added and a 20 percent rise in listings compared with July 2010, followed by Chicago, which the reported listed as having 3,727 jobs, a 31 percent increase from the same period a year ago. Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle and Philadelphia rounded out the top 10 in the listings.
On Dice, job postings get top billing because tech professionals hit their search engine and job postings are their beacon to a new career move, said Dice.com’s managing director, Alice Hill. “But behind the scenes, another central role is played by HR professionals and recruiters-mining the Dice resume database to find qualified professionals who are a fit for their organizations,” she said. “In fact, the emergence of new trends often occurs first in our resume database, simply because 80 percent of employers search resumes before posting their job.”
Based on Dice’s insights, Hill said it’s time to take notice of a group of five trends. One trend is the iRise platform, which offers business software application developers a high fidelity “test drive.” iRise creates a working preview of an app, allowing for tweaks before expensive coding begins.
Next is Commercial Off-The-Shelf (or COTS) software as a “boxed” solution versus an online version. COTS software can be consumer-focused, like the retail versions of TurboTax or Outlook, or incredibly complex, like the sonar software Lockheed Martin produces for U.S. Navy subs, Hill noted. Following COTS is the Crystal SDK. The Crystal software development kit allows iPhone and Android game developers to integrate Chillingo’s Crystal social platform. Crystal users can create profiles, challenge and follow friends, and integrate Facebook and Twitter.
The fourth trend concerns PeopleSoft Security. Hill said businesses use Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications to manage complex systems, from finances to human capital and supply chains to CRM databases, and PeopleSoft Security uses a hierarchical approach to limit data and application access to qualified users. The fifth subject is NetApp, a storage and data management solutions specialist. “Cloud and virtualization are big. More data, more storage, more flexibility is driving demand for tech professionals who can utilize NetApp’s solutions and platform,” Hill said.