In September, IT employment increased by 0.04% to 5,376,700 jobs, according to TechServe Alliance, the national trade association of the IT & Engineering Staffing and Solutions Industry. On a year-over-year basis, IT employment has increased by 4.15% since September 2020 adding 214,200 IT workers.
Engineering employment grew by 0.32% sequentially to 2,639,500. On a year-over-year basis, engineering employment increased by 2.84% since September 2020, adding 73,000 engineering workers.
“Employment in IT continued to inch up in September but the rate of growth started to plateau as predicted,” said Mark Roberts, CEO of TechServe Alliance. With IT unemployment at historically low levels at 2% in the third quarter, IT executives are struggling to hire. The pandemic pushed companies across industries to speed up decades worth of digital transformation projects within a span of a year. As demand for IT professionals spiraled, it also exacerbated the already existing tech talent shortage.
“The time for collaboration and creative solutions to shrink the supply-demand gap is now,” Roberts emphasized. To this end, TechServe Alliance is kicking off a dialog in partnership with Society for Information Management (SIM) to explore innovative solutions to ease the talent shortage during its annual Executive Summit in November.
“IT industry leaders must join forces and think out of the box to alleviate this talent crisis or risk a slowdown in growth and adoption of new technologies,” Roberts added.
