Comfort for federal techs
IT unemployment remains very low.
With the threats of sequestration and additional budget and job cuts still looming at federal agencies, it might be comforting at least to federal technology professionals that unemployment in their field remains significantly lower than other job professions.
Dice.com’s Tech Employment Snapshot for the fourth quarter of 2012 found that unemployment among technology professionals stands at 3.3 percent, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 7.8 percent in the fourth quarter.
“This recovery for tech professionals stands alone,” the report states. “More tech jobs have been created in the three and a half years since the end of the Great Recession than under the same recovery timelines in either 1991 or 2001.”
The largest gains in technology jobs came in the consulting sector, which added 21,000 positions in the fourth quarter of 2012. Partially offsetting those gains, however, were job losses in manufacturing of computer and electronics, Dice found.
Some IT positions saw unemployment numbers well below the overall 3.3 percent average for IT pros. Those fields include database administrators (1.5 percent), network architects (1.9 percent) and software developers (2.9 percent). Other IT fields also saw unemployment rates below the national average, such as computer systems analysts (3.3 percent), Web developers (3.5 percent), network and system administrators (4.3 percent), computer and information systems managers (4.3 percent), programmers (4.6 percent) and computer support specialists (4.9 percent), according to the report.
Still, the strong employment landscape for IT pros does not mean many of those professionals are fleeing their current jobs in hopes of a better offer. During the first two months of the fourth quarter of 2012, an average of only 388,000 employees in professional and business services quit their jobs. While that’s up slightly from the third quarter average of 378,000 per month, it’s still well below the 10-year average of 405,000, Dice found.
“The strong jobs recovery in technology hasn’t translated into more willingness or ability of workers to leave their jobs,” the report states, noting that this trend started with the Great Recession and has yet to recover.