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Threat hunters have discovered a new malware called Latrodectus that has been distributed as part of email phishing campaigns since at least late November 2023. "Latrodectus is an up-and-coming downloader with various sandbox evasion functionality," researchers from Proofpoint and Team Cymru said in a joint analysis published last week, adding it's designed to retrieve Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The ransomware industry surged in 2023 as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070. But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture. While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure

The ransomware industry surged in 2023 as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070. But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture. While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure The Hacker Newshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Like many global organizations, German logistics company DHL had career sites for almost every country in which the company operates — nearly 200 of them. Most of the sites, however, lacked brand consistency and none of them were leveraged to attract new hires. They were merely a place to fill out a job application.

DHL’s country-centric career sites also had limited integrations across a multitude of applicant tracking systems — this at a time when skills-based hiring had been growing to meet digitization and other business transformation efforts.

That prompted DHL to turn to generative artificial intelligence (genAI) to fix its talent recruitment problem by consolidating its 200 disparate sites into one site that parsed job seekers into ranked lists to match the company’s needed skillsets, and to which recruiters could quickly respond.

To create its unified site, DHL put together its own internal AI team and partnered with Phenom, a Philadelphia-based HR tech startup that sells a SaaS-based platform offering genAI and automation tools.

Though the company now has just one career site, each of its national locations can maintain their own identities with real-time customization capabilities. For example, in Prague, DHL created a site specifically to attract frontline workers for the peak holiday shopping season. (The low unemployment rate in the Czech Republic had made finding talent a challenge.)

Since the revamped site went live, the number of job seekers per job increased by 25%, 800,000 job searches found a relevant job within 5 milliseconds using AI-enabled features, and more than 200,000 job seekers became applicants in less than 14 minutes of the site’s launch.

Meredith Wellard, vice president of Group Talent Acquisition, Learning and Growth at DHL

DHL

Meredith Wellard, vice president of Group Talent Acquisition, Learning and Growth at DHL, oversaw the AI project from the HR side. DHL’s Express division had recently launched the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform and saw early wins, piquing Wellard’s interest. So, she decided to expand it to the entire company. The results were almost immediate. Wellard said the new AI-based career site produced a spike in candidate traffic, greater overall engagement, and faster hires. The shift to a more engaging career site was particularly good at attracting frontline workers, especially truck drivers, delivery people, and warehouse workers.

Wellard spoke with Computerworld about the genAI HR project, and offered insights into how the project rolled out and what other companies should look out for when executing their own genAI-based tech plans. The following are excerpts from that interview:

Tell me about your job at DHL. “I’ve been with DHL for 18 years. Over the last five years, I’ve been working in our corporate center, looking after the group topics when it comes to everything from employer, brand, the way we position ourselves in the markets, attracting and recruiting team members, building their skills, building them into internal talents and then, in principle, also offboarding them in a respectful way. Although we don’t do a whole lot of that.”

When did you start the project and what hurdles were you facing? “We started the project around 2019. That’s when all of this tech was quite new. We were only just starting to hear about this cool thing called Machine Learning or AI. They were trying to get their heads around what it meant and whether it would really be useful. So probably for the first 12 months, it was about us learning.

“I think that’s an important part for any team venturing out on new technology — learn before you get distracted by the shiny things, you know, that great sales pitch that many companies can do. So, we did a lot of learning, and we were cleaning up our applicant tracking system landscape at that same time — that’s the sort of back end of the recruiting process. Then at one of our divisions — our Express Division — they had actually done quite a lot of work and found Phenom and they had decided to try using Phenom and see if it worked for them. That was quite successful. So, off the back of their success, we thought, ‘You know what? I think this could work for the whole globe.’

“AI is not going to get rid of our jobs. Our jobs are not going to be taken by AI. Our jobs are going to be taken by people who know how to use AI.”

Meredith Wellard

“We set up what we called our Skydiver project. The reason we called it Skydiver was because it was fast, and it was like a jump out of a plane — kind of risky. It worked. We partnered with Phenom and over a six-month period we got the career site up and running. After six months, I think we had like maybe five languages on the site and 70 career sites [consolidated on it]. After about 18 months, we were down to about 11 career sites [that weren’t on it] and up to 21 languages. As of today, which is three years on, we’re on about 40 languages and we’ve got one career site.”

DHL had 200 career sites. First of all, can you explain that? Why did you have 200 career sites? “So, as you know, we have [about] 600,000 employees, and we’re in basically every country in the world — so, 220 countries. We do operate in a decentralized model, so the power is in the hands of the countries. They need to be really relevant to the local markets. We’re in a service industry, so it’s super important that you know the local environment is reflecting who they are very well when it comes to our recruiting activities.

“We also have a ‘global as necessary, as local as possible’ mindset, and we probably we missed a bit of the global part when we allowed whichever country that wanted to to set up a career site. And a lot of them did. By the time we started to think about partnering with some [of] these great career site tech companies or talent experience platform companies, we realized that we had quite some work to harmonize the landscape and bring together all of those career sites. Some of those sites had a lot of love and care put into creating them on a local level, but they had no [click-throughs] because they were turning up on page 17 of a Google search.

“And so it was quite important for us at the beginning to take those 200 or so career sites and figure out how to bring those together so that the local environments don’t lose what they need in terms of the localization. And it’s way more than language. It’s also things like the way the visuals appear, the way the jobs are presented, how users can click on them.

“We did a lot of research in the early days, looking at what would someone in Denmark expect from a career site versus someone in Japan, and from a user experience point of view those two are so different…culture-wise — even the visuals like the real estate usage expectations in a country like Japan versus Denmark, where it’s rather more sparse, and you know, spacious. It’s a cultural preference.

“So, we had to take care of all of those things and at the same time really take care to communicate and educate our business around how it wouldn’t be a natural thing for an HR professional — who knows everything about HR, legal aspects, recruiting, what a good interview looks like — it wouldn’t naturally be that they should know what it means to create a good SEO. Or how they could become more transparent on Google search. Or what would it take to have the right words, or the right visuals, or the right number of interactions in order to bring yourself up higher on a search result. This is not something that HR people know necessarily. Some do for sure, but not all of them do.”

What other issues were you facing? “I think the biggest one was definitely, because of those disconnected sites, it was definitely our visibility. The second one is around our brand. We have an amazing consumer brand. Everyone knows DHL — the red and the yellow. It’s bright. It’s engaging. It means a lot to every employee, and…our customers and the partners that we work with.

“Unfortunately, whilst the consumer brand is still is incredibly powerful, our employer brand was somewhat ad hoc. You know, people were creating things that they thought look nice that they thought represented. But there was no standardization and if you looked at one brand in in Germany, it might not look the same as one in South America. It just didn’t work. So that was the second big thing. We needed to align our brand to be more visible. As an employer, we want to be this great place to work for everyone. We’re this great company to work for, but how can you ensure everyone knows that if you can’t even tell a coherent story out into the market?

“A third thing is we wanted to take care that we minimized the likelihood of things like the fraudulent use of our brands. You hear these things in the market where companies had fraudsters say, ‘Pay me $50 and I’ll get you a job interview here or there.’ We just wanted to make sure that we weren’t exposed to that, because when you’ve got so many different sites, it does increase the risk of that type of activity. So, with that sort of compliance topic, as a company that really values good business practices like compliance, it is important to us. So that was the other thing that we had to address.

“The fourth thing we had to address was just bringing the recruiting audience together. When we have all of us looking together at our talents and saying, ‘OK, well you know if I’m recruiting out of our supply chain division and I’ve picked my gold medalist, but geez, there was three really strong silver medalists.’ We were just letting them go back into the market. We needed to be directing them go into other potential jobs in our company, not back into the market — especially nowadays.”

What are some of the talent challenges you’re facing, particularly with some of the digital technologies that you’re rolling out. “I don’t think we’re unique in this. There is obviously a huge demand for tech talent across the globe at the moment. And, the demand changes, I feel like it’s changing every six months. We started with everyone wanting blockchain specialists. Then there’s this whole push on project managers and some cloud architects. And they have moved on to the cybersecurity space. Now, most recently, we’ve got the whole generative AI and AI technicians and data analysts and so forth. It’s a constant churn of changing demand, and it’s sort of pulsing.

“I think the initial mode, because it’s what our go-to always has been, is we go to market and say we need this type of person. Of course, because we’re DHL and we’re a logistics company, you [as a job applicant] may wonder why would we need technical people. We realized that our reputation as an employer of technical people — IT-type people — wasn’t that it was a bad reputation. There was literally no reputation. Technical people were not thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get my degree and work for DHL.’

“So we had to really get the story out there why we are a good match for someone who wants to work in that space. We really have that type of technology that is cutting edge in terms of what you do as a technical contributor, it manifests in our business immediately. Whether it’s a proof of concept or a pilot, whether you’re working on Google glasses or Internet of Things, you can actually see how your work impacts customers and the business — and quite quickly. And, I think there are a lot of technical people who want to see the impact of their coding or their design or their project management or whatever on the customer or the business.”

You partnered with Phenom to help you roll out the genAI for your career site, but did you also build an internal team to roll out this technology? What kind of people were on that? “We have a really good internal team. Phenom became our partner, and we learned a lot from them. They had a lot of expertise about this very new technology. Internally, though, we have a really great coherent team working in a sort of agile working mode. That was also new to us, a working mode being in a scrum-based environment. That team’s made up of a set of HR professionals who know recruiting and who know what it means to bring and attract people onto our business but who also had the ability to translate those HR needs into technical language, if you like. They could talk then to another group of people who we worked with internally, IT professionals who were willing to talk to HR and ask them, ‘What does it mean to transform HR into this technical world?’

HR was one of the late adopters of technology. And I think that we found a really great group of IT professionals who were fascinated at how technology manifests to enable our people in a way very different from, say, the operations of finance.”

Did you also include folks from legal, finance, and compliance and others? “We call them our product owners. They’re the ones from the HR and from the business side. They describe what’s needed. They work with our actual operators out in the field, the recruiters and so forth. And they understand what’s required. They talk to IT in the language of IT, and IT says, ‘Here’s what we can provide as a solution.’ Then we say that’s an interesting solution — now let’s talk to compliance about how this will work from a compliance perspective? You know, we can’t be a company that says you can trust us completely unless that trust extends to candidates, applicants and so forth.

“We also talked to the compliance people. Then we have our procurement partners. They’re  talking about how our relationships are set up and how we can get the most out of these really powerful contracts that we have in place across the globe. And then of course there’s finance, which is looking after all those financial things. And then the managers. And the employees — everyone providing some insights from a personal perspective on how it should work for them. What would they want from your product like this? It’s really the whole company coming together.”

So how far down did you go on the management rung to get input? “All the way to our frontline supervisors in terms of testing it, trying it out, and giving us some feedback on how it looks and feels. We involved everyone…who is actually someone who needs to click the buttons to say, ‘Yes, I approve of this.’

“At the same time…, we spent a lot of time on our employer brand. Looking at what our brand looks like if we want consistency. It’s not just having the technology to do it, but you’ve got to have the right attributes. It’s a reflection of who we are internally. So, we talked, interviewed, surveyed, and ran workshops with literally 3,000 or 4,000 employees — maybe even more — to understand what their experience was working for us. What do they love about us? What should we talk about and not talk about? And through that we created this story around where we are as a company, and about how we’re a great team. And, once you’re in here, you bleed red and yellow. That’s the truth.”

Can you explain how your new, consolidated jobs site works to direct job seekers to the right open positions? “The nice thing about some of these new technologies is that AI is part of the experience, but it doesn’t feel somehow tricky. [Employees] will say I use ChatGPT to do this or that, and I’m like, it’s OK that you used it for that, just as long as you didn’t present it as your own work. On the career side, AI makes the whole thing super easy. It’s much simpler as part of the search experience. If I want to search for a job in Vietnam, I start to write ‘Vietnam,’ and the AI immediately recognizes where you’re located. It then triggers a set of jobs that start to come to you in the language that you’re writing in. This is very simple algorithm in the end, but it feels very personalized, very relevant.

“The second thing that happens is that you get the job recommendations. We have a Phenom-branded chatbot called Larry that allows customers to personalize it. He pops up and says, ‘Do you want more information?’ You start to enter in things and Larry will say things like, ‘Would you like to apply for a job or are you just browsing?’ He’ll tackle some of the first compliance questions like ‘Would you give permission for us to record some of your data?’ And as it does this, it starts to understand what sort of jobs the applicant or interested person might be a match for through one answer-type questions.

“Then once you get into the platform and start looking at the jobs, of course, it gets a little more intense — not so much for the candidate themselves, but more so for the recruiter who will immediately start to see people recommended for specific roles if they’ve given their consent for that. The [job seeker] didn’t apply for that, but let’s see if he’s interested, because this could be suitable for him.

“This type of matching AI is very useful for helping us bring to the surface the right people for the right jobs. In the past, it would have required recruiters to go through lists and lists and lists of [resumes] to try and find the right people for the right jobs. So, for me, that’s a super powerful use of the machine learning technology that we just didn’t have access to before.

“And then there’s about a million other things that it does. For example, once you find someone, you can send them an e-mail and the recruiter can click on a little AI helper in that email and choose to send an e-mail to the [job seeker] asking if they’re interested in talking about another opportunity we might have. So, it really makes the job easier.”

So give me an example like before and after, since rolling out the new AI-powered site. So back when you had 200 sites as opposed to now. “Let’s say I’m in South Africa on DHL’s career site. I’m hoping like crazy that someone’s going to find the career site and click on it. Maybe they go there and maybe they see some nice pictures and a statement from some of our employees on how they like the company. Then they might click on a job, and then that might get to a recruiter that information along with all the other people that have clicked on that job. But mostly what happened is that people would put [resumes] in there and probably not hear back, if I’m being honest.

“Now what happens on our career site is South Africa is in bold, and so they still have a very localized site, but it’s fully integrated with the global site. It’s the same global URL; it’s just that the page would have some local references, probably some local visuals, maybe some of the local employees talking about their experience working at some in South Africa with our company. The real difference is that as a candidate, now I go in and I get guided to the right sort of jobs based on my [resume]. The system parses the [resume], finds my skills and tells me there’s some jobs that might suit me. And then the recruiter who’s looking for someone with those skills doesn’t have to search through hundreds and hundreds of [resumes]. They get presented the ones that have the matching skills to the top of the list.

“So recruiters still have the list of 100 [applicants] if they want to look at them, but the ones that are matching what they’re looking for are at the top of the list. And that list [of applicants] could come not just from my unit…, but also includes DHL’s Express supply chain and our Freight Forwarding units in different parts of the country. They get to see it all now, not just that singular entry point.”

What’s the most unexpected benefit from the genAI-assisted, unified career site? “The unexpected things? This last couple of weeks, we’ve discovered that we are the most visible career platform in Germany. That means if you go searching for a job in Germany, you will find DHL before any other site, and we’re very close to being the number one job site in a lot of other countries as well. That is because it takes a good [career] site platform and it takes a good understanding of how you use that platform. We’ve reached the point where those two things have become really congruent. So we have some great people doing wonderful things with the content, continually updating our tags and the language alignment.

“But we also, of course, have a platform that allows us to do that fast and efficiently and we’ve set up a really nice process where we have people who are responsible for administering the content. In Costa Rica, in Malaysia, and in the Netherlands, it’s 24 hours a day those updates are made. So, for example, if the administrator in a particular company comes to us today and says something like, ‘We’ve just heard that XYZ company is closing down and we immediately want to get something onto the career site so that we can bring their employees to our site,’ we have someone somewhere in the world that can get that content on to the system. We didn’t realize that this would even be possible when we brought the product on.

“The expected things? Our reputation is improving, particularly with technical talent and young talent. Our ability to customize and really target content to appeal to certain [talent] audiences…has been quite rewarding.”

In what other ways has DHL used generative AI technology other than the career site? “We have what we call our Career Marketplace, which is an internal marketplace recommending people not only for jobs, but also learning networks and mentoring and these types of experiences. We’re in the middle of rolling that out at the moment. That will also include some very nice AI capabilities.

“We use a generative AI chatbot specifically for creating some of our internal marketing content, so, short videos and…training videos and things like that. The chatbot is called GAIA, which stands for Generative AI & Intelligent Automation.

“Internally, it has been super for those things also, because it doesn’t have to be done by a specialist, it can be done by people who have the right tools now. The company has been very wise and very fast, but at the same time cautious in setting up an internal generative AI tool that our employees can use, and that’s safe, and that’s compliant, and that’s able to be accessed by…everyone. Anyone who is the least bit interested in accessing it can. That has had two benefits: one, it gives people an awareness of what generative AI is and that it’s an actually something valuable if you use it well. And two, it also helps those who may have some fear or concerns understand that it’s not a monster. It is just a tool.

In what ways did DHL train its full-time employees in the use of AI? “We have a group within our company that took a more proactive role in informing and educating [employees], running workshops and webinars and inviting people to information sessions that were a bit more formal than our previous sort of soft rollout. And, there also people who are responsible for using AI or creating algorithms or machine learning or data analysts, who have had very formal education, and they’re using some of our learning partners to provide them with proper education on AI.”

Who are your learning partners? Are they universities in the various countries you’re located or online course providers? “We use Coursera a lot, for example. Also, Skillsoft Percipio. We also do have partnerships with universities…and other places that provide us with super advanced levels of education.”

Can you offer any tips for other organizations who are considering rolling out AI? What should they avoid? “I think they should avoid hysteria. I think what our company has done super well is I have never felt scared of AI. It was explained to us that this technology was just something that’s coming. It’s going to help us. It’s not going to cause problems if you get on board. There’s a quote that we’ve kind of thrown around in our business a bit. I can’t remember who it comes from, but it says something like, ‘AI is not going to get rid of our jobs. Our jobs are not going to be taken by AI. Our jobs are going to be taken by people who know how to use AI.’

“It’s not about replacing your job or being something you should be afraid of. It’s about getting your arms around it and learning how it’s going to help you be better at what you do.”

Careers, Emerging Technology, IT Jobs

A new phishing campaign has set its eyes on the Latin American region to deliver malicious payloads to Windows systems. "The phishing email contained a ZIP file attachment that when extracted reveals an HTML file that leads to a malicious file download posing as an invoice," Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Karla Agregado said. The email message, the company said, originates from an email

A new phishing campaign has set its eyes on the Latin American region to deliver malicious payloads to Windows systems. "The phishing email contained a ZIP file attachment that when extracted reveals an HTML file that leads to a malicious file download posing as an invoice," Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Karla Agregado said. The email message, the company said, originates from an email Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Google has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two app developers for allegedly engaging in an "international online consumer investment fraud scheme" that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns. The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam

Google has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two app developers for allegedly engaging in an "international online consumer investment fraud scheme" that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns. The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Nemůžeme nepřipomenout důležité výročí. Gmail oslavil 20. narozeniny a s ohledem na den uvedení ho mnoho brali jako aprílový žert. Jenže Google to s e-mailem myslel vážně a archivace, štítky, gigabajtová kapacita nebo dobré vyhledávání byly reálné. Jakkoli má Gmail své místo v historii, dnes už ...

Threat actors have been found exploiting a critical flaw in Magento to inject a persistent backdoor into e-commerce websites. The attack leverages CVE-2024-20720 (CVSS score: 9.1), which has been described by Adobe as a case of "improper neutralization of special elements" that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. It was addressed by the company as part of

Threat actors have been found exploiting a critical flaw in Magento to inject a persistent backdoor into e-commerce websites. The attack leverages CVE-2024-20720 (CVSS score: 9.1), which has been described by Adobe as a case of "improper neutralization of special elements" that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. It was addressed by the company as part of Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

After a lengthy spat of layoffs spiked unemployment rates in recent months, the tech industry is poised to return to growth, according to analyses of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released today.

Employers accelerated their hiring of technology workers and expanded their search for new tech talent in March, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

Tech companies added an estimated 6,000 workers last month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data. Job growth was led by new hiring in technology services, software development, cloud infrastructure and related positions.

Technology occupations throughout the economy rose by 203,000 for the month. That pushed the unemployment rate for tech occupations in March back down a full half a point from 3.5% in February to 3.0%, according to CompTIA.

CompTIA

Employers added 191,000 new job postings for tech positions, an increase of 8,000 from the previous month and the highest volume since August 2023. In total, there were an estimated 438,000 active tech job postings in March.

“With all four key tracking metrics in the positive for the month, it’s a welcome return to stability in the tech employment data,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.

By occupation category, software developers and IT support specialists saw the largest increases in openings from February to March. The job posting data also affirms that there are a variety of paths to a job in technology. CompTIA’s report shows that 46% of all tech jobs postings in March did not specify that candidates have a four-year degree.

Percentages were higher in certain job categories, such as IT support specialists (78%), network support specialists (66%) and web UI/UX designers (62%). Jobs in artificial intelligence (AI) or for occupations that require AI skills accounted for 41% of March postings in the emerging technologies sub-category.

Becky Frankiewicz, president of Manpower Group North America, took a more subdued view of the current tech market. “Our real-time data shows signs of a goldilocks labor market — hiring is slightly hotter than last year at this time, cooler than last month and warmer than pre-pandemic,” she said “This demonstrates remarkable resilience given the economic uncertainty we’re experiencing right now.”

Both the overall US unemployment rate, at 3.8%, and the number of unemployed people, at 6.4 million, changed little in March. The unemployment rate dropped one-tenth of a percent from February’s 3.9%.

Overall US unemployment has remained in a narrow range of 3.7% to 3.9% since August 2023, according to BLS data. While the unemployment rate changed little, the U.S. labor market added 303,000 jobs in March, which far exceeding the roughly 200,000 economists had predicted.

According to Janco Associates, a management consulting firm for the IT industry, the number of unfilled IT jobs fell from 202,000 in January to 117,000 in February — a drop of more than 42%.

CompTIA

Tech demand remains stronger than last year at this time and was stronger in Q1 2024 than during the final three months of 2023.

“Demand for AI and machine learning engineers has continued to grow for the last few years, and we’re recognizing that with increased tech demand comes increased training and upskilling,” said Ger Doyle, senior vice president at ManpowerGroup and Head of Experis North America — a ManpowerGroup focused on recruitment of US tech talent.

“Humanizing tech roles is the key to continuing this growth, making the ladder for tech roles in reach and bringing attainable skills to employers and employees alike,” Doyle said.

In its “State of the Tech Workforce 2024,” CompTIA forecasts tech employment growth of 3.1% this year — a net gain of more than 300,000 new jobs. That compares to the 1.2% growth rate of 2023, which yielded about 117,000 net new hires.

Top projected occupations for this year, and their growth rates, include: data scientists and data analysts, up 5.5%; cybersecurity analysts and engineers, up 5.1%; software developers and engineers up 4.8%; software QA and testers, up 4.3%; computer and information research scientists, also up 4.3%; CIOs and IT Directors, up 3.6%; web developers, also up 3.6%; and web and digital interface designers, up 3.6%.

According to projections from the BLS statistics and job market analytics firm Lightcast, the tech workforce will grow twice as fast in the next 10 years as the overall US workforce. The replacement rate for tech occupations during the 2024-2034 period is expected to average about 6% annually, or approximately 350,000 workers each year, totaling several million through 2034.

Growth in so-called “driver occupations” will expand even faster. Positions in the data science and data analyst, cybersecurity, software development, UI/UX and emerging tech categories, including artificial intelligence, will grow at the fastest rates on a percentage basis, according to CompTIA. “On a volume basis, core infrastructure positions in networking and cloud engineering, along with tech support positions, will continue to serve as the on ramp for many starting a career in technology,” the report stated.

Projections from CompTIA’s report indicate that 20 states and 14 metropolitan areas will exceed the average growth rate this year. Twenty-six metro markets are expected to at least double last year’s job growth rate, reflecting the diversity of tech hub concentrations across the US.

February 2024

US unemployment in the technology sector increased by 0.2% to 3.5% last month, following an upward trend in joblessness in all sectors.

Technology occupations across the economy declined by an estimated 133,000 positions, according to a new report from IT industry group CompTIA.

Overall, the US unemployment rate among all job markets rose by 0.2% to 3.9% in February, and the number of unemployed people increased by 334,000 to 6.5 million. A year earlier, the jobless rate was 3.6%, and the number of unemployed people was 6 million. While unemployment did tick up, February’s rate continued the longest stretch of unemployment below 4% in decades.

There were 275,000 jobs added to the US market last month, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report today. The data shows a significant uptick over January’s 229,000 jobs added to the workforce, but lower than December’s numbers, when 290,000 jobs were added.

“New hiring of tech services and software development personnel is the lone bright spot in February’s lackluster technology employment data,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at IT industry group CompTIA.

Overall tech industry employment increased modestly, employer job postings for future tech hiring were flat, tech occupations throughout the economy declined, according to CompTIA’s latest jobs report.

“We continue to see the lag effect of market developments working their way into government employment data,” Hebert said. “While employers across every sector of the economy demand tech talent spanning the continuum of tech job roles, there are pockets of employers recalibrating their staffing levels.”

IT business consultancy Janco Associates had a similar take on the lackluster IT job market performance in February. It said in its report today that hiring of IT Pros is hindered by the lack of qualified individuals and a slowing economic picture, which “will have a dampening impact on the growth of the IT job market size.

According to Janco’s data, there are currently 4.18 million US workers employed as IT professionals. The rate of growth in the number of new IT jobs has slowed, the firm said.

“There now are just over 121,000 unemployed IT professionals. The IT job market shrank by over 48,600 jobs in calendar year 2023, Janco’s report stated. “Overall that is a flattening of the long term growth rate pattern of IT job market,” the firm said.

One of the more surprising results of the BLS report, however, was that the agency drastically revised its January job gains, which had previously been reported as a leap of 353,000 new jobs. The revised numbers dropped that by more 124,000 jobs.

Tech employers added 185,000 new job postings for positions in February, raising the total number of active tech job postings to more than 436,000, according to CompTIA’s data. California, Texas and Virginia had the largest volumes of tech job postings among the states. At the metro level, Washington, New York, Dallas, Chicago and Boston were the most active markets. 

Open positions in artificial intelligence or jobs requiring AI skills continue to hover near the 10% threshold, while positions offering hybrid, remote or work from home options account for about 20% of all tech job postings, CompTIA’s report showed.

Technology companies added an estimated 2,340 workers last month, CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data showed. The technology services and software development sub-sector saw employment increase by 4,200 positions, but those gains were offset by staffing reductions in telecommunications and manufacturing.

Net tech employment spanning tech industry and tech occupation employment totaled more than 9.6 million workers, according to CompTIA’s data.

Over the next quarter — from April through June — the US is expected to lead all other nations in IT hiring, according to IT staffing firm Experis, a subsidiary of ManpowerGroup.

Ger Doyle, head of IT staffing at Experis North America, said while hiring data shows worker demand will remain strong, it will be “more balanced and concentrated.”

Nurses, software developers and front-line retail workers are the three most sought after roles in the U.S. today, according to Doyle.

“In the tech space, AI and machine learning engineers are seeing good growth since last year, with finance and consulting companies as some of the top employers of this specialist tech talent,” Doyle said.

While tech sector layoffs have made headlines over the past year Experis’s data shows the same companies laying people off are also hiring, including top tech companies such as Google, META, Amazon and Apple. However, consuntancies and financial services companies are also hiring – firms such as KPMG, Booz Allen Hamilton, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Slalom Consulting, according to Doyle.

While artificial intelligence and machine learning engineer hiring decreased by 1% in February, the demand for the roles has been trending upward since May 2023, Doyle said.

Wages are following suit, and have remained steady overall, with month-over-month increases in some sectors where remote and hybrid roles have increased, such as IT and business operations.

Hybrid job roles are strongest in the IT (38%) and finance (40%) sectors, according to Experis data.

January 2024

The US added twice as many jobs in January as analysts had expected, though the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.7% and tech layoffs continued to plague the IT industry.

In January, the US added 353,000 jobs, according to data published today by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And for tech workers, the latest employment data suggests 2024 is off to a promising start, according to an analysis by IT trade association CompTIA.

Tech companies added nearly 18,000 workers last month, the second consecutive month of job growth. The unemployment rate for tech occupations remained at 3.3%, well below the overall national rate, according to CompTIA. Yet, overall, tech occupations, which span all industries, were down in January.

Tech companies added jobs in several primary sub-sectors:

• Technology services and software development (+14,500)
• Cloud infrastructure (+2,100)
• Tech manufacturing (most notably semiconductors) (+1,400)

Also, on the rise – job openings in artificial intelligence (AI) and positions that offer hybrid, remote, or work from home options. AI job postings or jobs requiring AI skills increased by about 2,000 positions from December to 17,479 last month, CompTIA said.

Tech occupations across all markets and the broader economy, however, declined by an estimated 117,000 positions. “This month’s data is a helpful reminder of the many moving parts in assessing tech workforce gains or losses,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The expansive tech workforce will simultaneously experience gains and losses reflecting employer short-term and longer-term staffing needs.”

Employers listed more than 392,000 active tech job postings, with nearly 178,000 added last month alone. January’s total of active postings was 33,727 more than the December 2023 figure, the largest month-to-month increase in a year.

There was significant employer interest in filling positions in software development, IT project management, data analysis and science, IT support and systems analysis and engineering. And after several months of decline, the number of job postings offering hybrid, remote or work-from-home options exceeded 30,000 in January, up about 5,000 from December.

“Looking at the bigger picture, we continue to see a post-pandemic rebalancing,” said Becky Frankiewicz, president of staffing firm ManpowerGroup NA. “While hiring isn’t as strong as a year ago, it is better than pre-pandemic and has improved month-over-month.

“We’re also seeing an expected post-holiday hangover in retail and logistics, balanced by increases in IT, finance, accounting and engineering,” she continued. “Overall, more jobs are available now for each unemployed worker than there were before the pandemic, creating a stable environment for employers and employees.” 

Layoffs in the tech sector have been a thorn in the side of an otherwise healthy industry. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively laid off tens of thousands of workers last year and were among a number of companies that announced planned layoffs for this year. Meta and Google and AWS are cutting back on more ambitious “moonshot” projects, as enterprises are still hesitant to spend big on large software buildouts, etc.

This week, iRobot announced it would lay off about 31% of its 1,250 employees after a deal to be acquired by Amazon fell through.

The number of employees laid off at tech companies more than tripled between December and January, according to industry tracker Layoff.fyi. So far this year, 115 tech firms have laid off 30,375 employees, according to the site.

Though layoffs remain below pre-pandemic levels, the number of US employees filing for jobless benefits last week reached an 11-week high. And while the stock market continues to soar, tech companies appear worried.

Many segments of the market remain soft, according to Jack Gold, principal analyst with business consultancy J. Gold Associates. That is likely to continue for at least the next two quarters, he said.

“Tech layoffs might make the headlines, but our real-time data shows a more nuanced story. In many cases, the same companies that are laying people off are also still hiring — they’re just laser focused on hiring to meet demand,” said Ger Doyle, senior vice president of tech employment service Experis.

As an example, Microsoft and Amazon, which recently cut jobs in gaming and streaming, respectively, are simultaneously planning huge investments in AI, according to Doyle. 

Experis’s data shows tech demand rebounded in January (up 26% compared to  December), with demand for AI/ML engineers growing 19% last month.

“AI hiring is through the roof due to betting on the future next big thing,” Gold said. “But that leaves many more mature industries vulnerable to scaling back. The thinking in many companies is, let’s cut back on ‘fringe’ stuff until we can determine if we’re going to be OK.”

Doyle said it’s important for employess to keep a focus on internal mobility. “We’re also seeing small and mid-size companies have their moment, scooping up tech talent that may have let go by the big hitters. It’s also important to remember that today every company is a tech company — Capital One, Doordash and Reddit are among the top hirers of AI and machine learning talent in the country today.

“Those with tech skills will still find themselves in high demand and able to call the shots on remote working, too…,” Doyle said.

December 2023

Unemployment in the IT industry ticked up from 2% in November to 2.3% in December, according to an analysis of the latest jobs data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Tech occupations throughout the US economy declined by 79,000 positions last month, though the unemployment rate for tech occupations was still well below the overall national unemployment rate of 3.7%.

The up-and-down pattern in tech employment seen over the past few months continued in December, according to CompTIA, an IT trade association.

Tech companies added the largest number of workers since April, but tech occupations throughout the economy declined, according to CompTIA’s analysis of data from the BLS.

Job postings for tech occupations also fell. Active postings totaled nearly 364,000, including 142,295 newly added by employers in December, according to CompTIA.

There’s still strong demand for tech workers; US employers advertised 3.13 million IT job postings during 2023 for a wide range of positions including support, infrastructure, software, data, cybersecurity, and technology enablement.

In December, the top tech job postings by job openings in the US were:

• Software Developers and Engineers — 40,490;
• IT Project Management, Data Analysts, Emerging, Other — 27,853;
• IT Support Specialists — 16,526;
• Systems Analysts and Engineers — 12,513;
• Data Scientists — 10,293.

(Not every “help wanted” ad results in a new hire; generally, the ratio is one new hire for every eight job postings, according to CompTIA.)

One area that saw marked hiring involved artificial intelligence (AI) roles. Employer hiring for AI and other specialized skills continued to exceed 10% of all tech job postings, CompTIA said.

The push for AI and generative AI hires might be having an adverse effect on entry-level IT positions, especially in customer service, telecommunications, and hosting automation, according to Victor Janulaitis, CEO of IT consultancy Janco Associates, Inc.

“CIOs and CFOs are looking to improve the productivity of IT by automating processes and reporting where possible,” Janulaitis said. “They are focusing on eliminating ‘non-essential’ managers, staff, and services. Experienced coders and developers still have opportunities.”

The highest demand continues to be for AI specialists, security professionals, programmers, and blockchain processing experts, according to Janulaitis.

Ger Doyle, senior vice president of IT staffing firm Experis, said he still sees “very strong demand” for full stack developers, data scientists, and AI experts. “Seventy-six percent of IT employers say they are facing difficulty finding the talent they need,” Doyle said.

“Supporting people to gain experience and develop new skills will be key to alleviating talent shortages and helping people build employability for the long term,” IT staffing firm ManpowerGroup said in a statement.

Overall, US employers anticipate measured hiring in the first quarter of 2024, while persistent talent shortages continue to impede hiring, according to the latest Employment Outlook Survey from staffing firm ManpowerGroup. With seasonal variations removed from the data, the Net Employment Outlook (NEO) for the U.S. is +35%. 

(The NEO is derived by taking the percentage of employers anticipating an increase in hiring activity and subtracting the percentage of employers who expect a decrease in employment at their location in the next quarter.)

Globally, the US ties for second place in the world (+35%), outpaced by first-place ties, India and The Netherlands (+37%).

“Tech employment remains on solid footing,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “Despite the ongoing pattern of mixed signals in the labor market tracking data, the optimistic outlook continues to hold.”

Janulaitis saw it differently, however: “Layoffs at big tech companies continued to hurt overall IT hiring in 2023. CIOs are looking at a troubling economic climate and are evaluating the need for increased headcounts based on the technological requirements of their specific business operations. At the same time, with a mean total compensation of $100,000 for ITpPros, IT will continue to be a target for budget cutting.”

Talent mobility is set to be the key trend of the new year — employers need to look for potential vs past performance and help people make lateral moves within their organization, according to ManpowerGroup.

In December, overall US employment rose by 216,000 people, according to the BLS . The overall unemployment rate remained unchanged from the previous month, with the number of unemployed workers was essentially unchanged at 6.3 million.

Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services continued to trend up, adding 25,000 jobs; the industry added an average of 22,000 jobs per month in 2023, about half the average monthly gain of 41,000 in 2022, according to the BLS report.

For all of 2023, the US added 2.7 million jobs. While the overall unemployment rate has remained under 4% over the past two years, last year ended with a higher unemployment rate (3.7%) than in 2022 (3.5%). Employment continued to trend up in government, healthcare, social assistance, and construction, while transportation and warehousing lost jobs.

“The 2024 labor market is all about balance and moderation — restoring equilibrium after four years of pandemic related swings,” said Becky Frankiewicz, president of the North America Region for staffing firm ManpowerGroup. “Today’s report…shows continued stabilization and an optimistic start to the New Year for employers and workers. Employers are holding onto their people and hiring where the demand exists.”  

Average hourly wage growth accelerated slightly in December, rising by 4.1% over the previous 12 months to $34.27 an hour and continued to beat inflation, boosting workers’ spending power, according to BLS data.

November 2023

The number of new IT jobs being added to the US economy has continued to shrink over the past three months, even as the unemployment rate for tech workers has remained near historical lows.

The unemployment rate for tech workers dropped from 2.2% in October to about 2% in November, according to new data based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Overall, US employment increased by 199,000 in November, and the national unemployment rate edged down to 3.7%, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That tracks with October, when employment increased by about 150,000 jobs and the unemployment rate was 3.9%.

While there have been a plethora of big employers announcing tech layoffs, there has also been a redistribution of tech talent to midsize and small companies that “finally got their shot at hiring talent post-pandemic,” according to Becky Frankiewicz, president of ManpowerGroup, North America.

“This talent was scooped up almost in real time by smaller size businesses, so it remains quite difficult to fill tech roles in the country,” Frankiewicz said. “Now that every company is a tech company, we also saw tech talent absorbed into other sectors outside of tech — like retail and hospitality.

“We continue to see strong demand in business analyst roles and software developers as companies continue to work on readying projects for the new year and building out their apps for more clicks this season,” she added.

According to a report from business consultancy Janco Associates, the IT job market shrank by 12,000 open positions in the last three months, leaving 101,000 unemployed IT professionals. At the same time, close to the same number of tech positions remain unfilled.

“CIOs have started to halt hiring IT pros. Demand for contractors and consultants is slow due to economic uncertainty,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said in the report. “On a bright side, there are still over 120K unfilled jobs for IT professionals.”

Year to date, the IT job market has shrunk by 24,900 positions, according to Janco’s report. Currently, about 4.18 million people are employed as IT professionals in the US, according to Janco.

Janco’s figures show a year-to-date loss of nearly 25,000 IT jobs.

In the past 18 months, the number of IT pros hired each month has moved from 105,00 to 57,000 in October 2023.

“2023 was not a good year for the size of the IT job market,” Janulaitis said. “We currently do not see any change in that trend. In our professional opinion, in 2024 the size of the IT job market will remain at about the same levels as the fourth quarter of 2023, with growth in size limited to minimal levels.”

The number of unfilled positions for IT pros has fallen from 148,000 to 101,000 in the past 18 months. “There still is demand; however, not at the peak of the post-pandemic hiring frenzy,” Janulaitis said.

Not all IT job reports were doom and gloom, however. CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and its workers, echoed ManpowerGroup’s findings, saying that hiring among SMBs is up — way up. And employer demand for AI talent boosted the share of job postings to 12%, the company stated.

Meanwhile, CompTIA’s numbers showed tech unemployment to be at 1.7%, well below ManpowerGroup’s figures, even as it estimated that tech occupations throughout the economy declined by 210,000 last month.

Tech occupations across the economy increased by an estimated 483,000 jobs, according to CompTIA. Tech firms added an estimated 2,159 workers, mainly in IT services and custom software development, CompTIA’s Tech Jobs Report showed.

“With the gains in employer hiring intent for AI talent, the job posting data is finally catching up to the hype,” said Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer. “As an enabling technology, companies hiring for AI skills inevitably need to boost adjacencies in areas such as data infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business process automation.” 

Employer hiring activity as measured by job postings for tech positions totaled 155,621 for November. Jobs associated with artificial intelligence (AI) made up 12% of the total, more than 18,000 postings. It’s the first time AI positions have surpassed the 10% threshold. Positions in emerging technologies or jobs that require emerging tech skills accounted for 26% of tech job postings last month.

Tech job postings continue to fall. (Click image to enlarge it.)

ManpowerGroup’s Frankiewicz said her company’s analysts anticipated a stabilization of the IT job market with real-time data showing impacts to all sectors, including “always-hot healthcare” and retail.

“In real time, we’re seeing double-digit declines in job postings month over month and year over year that we haven’t seen since 2020. This moderation is welcome for many employers — who are finding it easier to fill vacancies,” Frankiewicz said.

“Time to fill roles has dropped to 49 days in November, from an average of 122 days in 2023 to date. For highly skilled roles like software developer, the time to fill has dropped by more than half, from 106 days to 29,” she added.

“We’re also seeing signs of the heavy hitter big companies taking a back seat and midsize employers with 50-249 employees having their moment — a trend that began with tech talent and is now impacting across the board,” Frankiewicz said.

October 2023

The national job rate for technology workers remained little changed in October, according to an analysis of data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The unemployment rate for tech workers in October dropped from 2.2% in September to 2.1% last month, even as there has been a cooling in the broader US job market. Technology companies and employers throughout the economy added workers to their payrolls in October, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and its workers.

Tech occupations across the economy increased by an estimated 483,000 jobs, according to CompTIA. Tech firms added an estimated 2,159 workers, mainly in IT services and custom software development, CompTIA’s Tech Jobs Report showed.

It was the second consecutive month of job growth in the sector — albeit at a modest pace.

“It’s fair to say tech employment gains for the month exceeded expectations, given the recent labor market swings,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “Companies continue to focus on the technologies and skills that deliver meaningful business value.”

California, Texas, Virginia, Florida and New York had the highest volumes of tech job postings among the states, CompTIA indicated. The Charlotte, Boston, San Diego, Cleveland and Phoenix markets were also active in October, with month-over-month increases in employer postings for tech jobs.

While the US market added 150,000 jobs in October, the overall unemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 3.9%, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of unemployed persons — 6.5 million — changed little in October. However, since their recent lows in April, those numbers are up by 0.5% and 849,000, respectively.

The uptick in unemployment and the slower pace of hiring pointed to a cooling of the employment market. In September, for example, 279,000 jobs were added to the US economy.

Becky Frankiewicz, president of staffing firm ManpowerGroup’s North America region, credited the slowdown for employees being less likely to leave for new roles than they were at the height of the pandemic. Hiring, she said, is solid but settling down.

“Our real-time data shows that in many sectors, especially blue-collar and tech, the market is finding balance,” she said. “The post-pandemic hiring frenzy and summer hiring warmth has cooled and companies are now holding onto employees.”

The tech sector is also cooling from its torrid growth over the past two or more years, but there’s still demand for highly skilled positions including app developers, cyber security experts and data analysts, Frankiewicz said.

“The most in-demand functions remain steady — with most new roles posted in medical and healthcare, sales and IT,” she said.

After a spike in the number of openings for IT professionals in the early summer, the number of unfilled openings for IT professionals fell from 201,000 in August to 160,000 in September. That reflects a pullback from the peak of 254,000 opening in July, according to Frankiewicz.

About 20% of job postings offered work from home or remote work as an option, according to CompTIA. One-quarter were for positions in emerging technologies or jobs that require emerging tech skills, including 16,000 associated with artificial intelligence (AI) jobs and skills. Employer hiring for AI positions and skills continues to trend upward, although it’s still a relatively small share of overall tech hiring activity.

Along with AI-skilled workers, software developers, IT support specialists, systems analysts, and data scientists are among the job roles in greatest demand, according to CompTIA.

Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Utah-based research firm Janco Associates, agreed AI and machine learning skills are in demand, though the number of coder openings is falling. At the same time, hiring of IT professionals is hindered by the lack of qualified individuals and a slowing economic picture.

“This will have a dampening impact on the growth of the IT Job Market size,” Janco stated in its latest tech market jobs report.

September 2023

The US unemployment rate remained at 3.8% in September, but the market added 336,000 jobs, far surpassing analyst expectations, according to today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.

Tech employment, however, was a laggard in the generally upbeat US employment report released today, according to analysis by the nonprofit trade association CompTIA. Key metrics of tech hiring activity all slipped in September, its report showed.

Tech jobs among all sectors across the economy fell by an estimated 20,000. The technology sector unemployment rate ticked up from 2.1% in August to 2.2% in September, but it remains well below the national rate of 3.8%, according to CompTIA.

Tech salaries also appeared to be on a downslope, according to an analysis by job matching site Hired, which notes that US inflation-adjusted salaries have plummeted to a five-year low.

Meanwhile, tech sector companies reduced staffing by a net 2,632 positions last month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data.

Employer job postings for future tech hiring also fell to 184,077 in September, down from nearly 208,000 in August. (Future tech hiring is defined by CompTIA as expected open requisitions.)

“Demand for software positions continues to drive the largest volume of hiring activity. In the aggregate, volumes are equally large in positions spanning IT project management, IT support, data analytics, and systems/cloud infrastructure,” CompTIA’s report stated.

Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills accounted for 26.5% of all tech jobs postings last month, up from 22% in August. Within emerging tech job postings, 36% were associated with artificial intelligence (AI).

“There is no sugar-coating the off month of tech employment data,” Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer, said in a statement. “Despite the persistently high demand for tech skills on many fronts and positive forward-looking projections, there is a lag in hiring at the moment.”

Jim McCoy, senior vice president of staffing firm ManpowerGroup, echoed Hebert’s sentiments on tech employment, but he said one bright sector has been smaller firms that are still dealing with a skills gap.

“To be sure, large companies have pulled back hiring and even cut workers, especially in technology, as borrowing costs have spiraled higher,” McCoy said. “But many small and midsized businesses that struggled to attract workers are snapping up those laid off and drawing from a more plentiful labor supply as Americans sidelined by COVID return to the workforce.”

The BLS jobs report showed the average hourly earnings for all employees rose by 7 cents, or 0.2%, to $33.88. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings  have increased by 4.2%, the report stated. In September, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 6 cents, or 0.2%, to $29.06.

While hiring may be up overall, real wages in the technology sector appeared to be declining, according to a recent report from job matching site Hired.

In its annual State of Tech Salaries Report, released in late September, Hired said the tech talent market has seen dramatic shifts from 2022 to the first half of 2023, fueling tension and misalignment between recruiter and job candidate expectations.

Following a year of record-breaking inflation and market turbulence, local salaries in the US, including those for fully in-person or hybrid roles, have experienced their most significant year-over-year decline, dropping by 3% from $161,000 to $156,000. In contrast, salaries in the UK have seen a 4% increase, rising from £82,000 to £86,000, according to Hired.

When adjusted for inflation, local salaries decreased 9% from $141K in 2022 to $129K by mid-2023, while remote salaries decreased 6% from $143K in 2022 to $134K by mid-2023.

Amid the rise of generative AI and a tightening of corporate budgets, junior talent (workers with less than four years of experience) have experienced the most significant decrease in salaries — nearly 5% year-over-year — and demand, with posted roles on the platform lowering from 45% in 2019 to 25% in the first half of 2023, according to Hired’s report.

“Compared to last year, we are witnessing a seismic shift in tech employee and employer preferences. The surging demand for experienced tech talent on our platform and employers’ increasing reliance on AI tools point to an ever-growing skills gap. This challenge will only heighten as companies reduce their hiring locations amid their return to the office and limit their access to qualified talent,” said Josh Brenner, CEO at Hired.

“With the future talent pipeline at risk of a deficit, companies cannot afford to disregard high-quality talent at any level. Instead, they must embrace diverse candidates with transferable skills who can adeptly address industry challenges, especially amid rapid advancements driven by emerging technologies like AI,” Brenner added.

The highest paid tech workers were engineering managers, particularly with the introduction of AI tools and increased cybersecurity challenges. Engineering managers earn on average $202,000 in the US and £118,000 in the UK — a notable 10% increase from £107,000 at the end of 2022. 

Specialized engineers are the most in demand in 2023: Employers on Hired’s marketplace have a higher demand for specialized engineers, especially for AI applications such as ML, as well as cybersecurity, data, and back-end engineers.

AI isn’t an immediate threat to job security, but it could present challenges for job seekers in the coming years: While the majority of surveyed candidates (87%) currently do not view AI as the primary threat to their roles, a significant portion of employers (47%) project they will leverage AI to reduce headcounts by 2029.

Overall, there were job gains in leisure and hospitality, government, healthcare, professional services, scientific and technical services, and social assistance.

Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services increased by 29,000 jobs in September, in line with the average monthly gain of 27,000 over the prior 12 months, BLS data showed.

Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, identified the 10 AI skills listed most often on client open job requisitions for IT professionals. The one AI skill that was included in more than 60% of those requisitions: ChatGPT.

“Since its launch in November of 2022, ChatGPT has been implemented by the greatest number of organizations,” Janulaitis said in a blog post. “As a result, companies are recruiting IT professionals who have the skills to help them with using ChatGPT for content generation, task automation and scripting… and more.”

Other skills listed in open IT job requisitions: Natural Language Processing, TensorFlow, Image Processing, PyTorch, Generative AI content creation, Midjourney, AI Chatbot, Model Tuning, and Stable Diffusion.

PricewaterhouseCooper’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found sizeable pockets of the global workforce eager to learn new skills, embrace artificial intelligence (AI), and tackle new challenges — even as many companies fail to tolerate debate and dissenting ideas, or even small-scale failures. Meanwhile, many workers are restless: fully 26% say they plan to quit their job in the next 12 months, up from 19% last year.

August 2023

Though they remain low, unemployment figures have seesawed over the past six months, a phenomenon that has some tech industry experts scratching their heads trying to make sense of what may be the new norm.

Last month, unemployment in technology fields increased along with the overall US unemployment rate, which rose from 3.5% in July to 3.8% in August, according to new data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, total nonfarm employment across all markets increased by 187,000 jobs in August.

The mixed messages in last Friday’s employment report carried over to the tech industry and workforce, according an analysis by industry group CompTIA.

Tech unemployment had dropped from 2.3% in June to 1.8% in July, as tech firms and employers in other industries added workers after a spate of high-profile layoffs in the tech industry.

The latest BLS report, however, found that employers across the US economy reduced tech occupations by an estimated 189,000 positions, pushing the unemployment rate for tech jobs up to 2.1% — almost where it was in June, CompTIA said.

“The usual caveats of monthly fluctuations in labor market data apply,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The seesawing between strong and lagging tech jobs reports is undoubtedly confusing, but the overall macro trend of growth in the depth and breadth of the tech workforce remains steady.”

Employer job postings for future tech hiring (a separate category tracked by CompTIA) totaled nearly 208,000 in August, a slight decline of 1.4% from the previous month. But job postings for information security analysts increased 19% from July to August to more than 12,000 postings. Other in-demand occupations include software developers, tech support specialists, computer systems analysts, and data scientists.

“With ‘pandemic paranoia’ about hiring lingering, companies are continuing to hold onto their workers, remembering how hard it was to rehire,” said Becky Frankiewicz, president of global staffing firm ManpowerGroup’s North America Region. “Essential workers we valued through the pandemic may not be feeling so essential, as real-time job postings for blue collar roles like operations and logistics/maintenance and repair are down 43% month over month” based on ManpowerGroup’s real-time data.

“This Labor Day is a great occasion to celebrate the resilience of the American worker,” she said. “Although we are seeing a slowdown, the labor market remains healthy, and we are optimistic about the future.”

Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, accounted for 23% of all tech jobs postings in August. Among emerging tech job postings, 37% were associated with AI, with California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia showing the highest numbers of AI-related job postings.

New data from IT staffing firm Experis found that an increasing number of companies surveyed are either adopting or planning to adopt emerging technologies in their recruiting processes. That comes as more than three quarters (78%) of IT organizations report difficulty finding talent with the right skills — a 17-year high.

According to Experis, 58% of employers believe AI and virtual reality will create jobs, not kill them. Additionally, cybersecurity, technical support, and customer experience remain high-priority IT staffing areas. Half of employers say they are training and upskilling their current workforce to address staffing challenges.

“The integration of AI, machine learning, VR/AR, and other emerging technologies is rapidly transforming industries and driving the need for an adaptable workforce,” said Experis Senior Vice President Ger Doyle. “We are seeing companies embrace these new technologies with many seeking to hire or upskill existing talent to take advantage of potential productivity gains. Smart employers know that embracing digitization and nurturing human talent will enhance their readiness to succeed in this era of rapid technological advancement.”

July 2023

The unemployment rate for tech jobs dropped from 2.3% to 1.8% in July, as technology companies and employers in other industry sectors added workers, according to analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.

It was the lowest tech-sector unemployment rate since January, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

The overall US unemployment rate also dropped slightly last month from 3.6% in June to 3.5%, according to BLS data. About 187,000 non-farm jobs were added, less than the average monthly gain of 312,000 over the prior 12 months. In July, jobs grew in healthcare, social assistance, financial activities, and wholesale trade, according to the BLS.

The overall unemployment rate has ranged from 3.4% to 3.7% since March 2022.

According to BLS data, employment in professional, scientific, and technical services continued to trend up in July with 24,000 positions filled.

Tech sector companies increased their staffing by 5,432 employees, according to CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data. Leading the way in new IT hires were custom software services and systems design;and PC, semiconductor and components manufacturing.

IT salaries were on the rise, too, according to a mid-year analysis by business consultancy Janco Associates, as more companies invested in IT. The emphasis in recent years has been on both e-commerce and mobile computing. And with growing numbers of cyberattacks and data breaches, CIOs are looking to harden their sites and lock down data access to protect all of their electronic assets, according to Janco Associates.

The lone drag on the July data was in employer job postings for tech occupations, which slipped to from 236,000 in June to 204,400 for the month of July.

“Given the pace of tech hiring, it remains a fairly tight market for tech talent,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer for CompTIA, said in a statement. “It continues to be an environment where employers must supplement recruiting efforts with proactive talent development strategies.”

While the drop in tech sector unemployment is notable, it’s not uncommon for rates to fluctuate, according to Herbert. Over the past 5.5 years dating back t0 January 2018, the tech unemployment rate saw a 1/2-point or higher rise or fall from the previous month 27 times, which translates to 40% of the time, he said in an email to Computerworld.

In comparison, the national unemployment saw the same kind of variation 22 times, or 33% of the time. Herbert said.

“Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not provide data at a granular enough level to pinpoint the exact tech occupation categories driving changes in the unemployment rate,” Herbert said. “The employer job posting data indicates hiring activity is broad-based spanning all the major job families within tech.”

The way the BLS tracks job seekers also matters; it only keeps tabs on people actively looking for employment, Herbert noted.

“There could be scenarios whereby certain segments of workers go uncounted in the unemployment rate because they put their job search on pause — perhaps to re-evaluate their job search strategy, to pursue additional training, to recharge their batteries, etc.,” he said. “This could have the effect of artificially lowering the unemployment rate.”

There is a difference, however, between the long-term unemployed who might lack skills demanded in the labor market and those who voluntarily put a job search on hold. “My sense is tech workers in this position tend to fall in the latter category given most have in demand skills,” Herbert added.

Janco Associates painted a somewhat gloomier picture of the IT jobs landscape: it said that year to date, IT jobs shrank by 5,500 positions. That’s in contrast to 125,900 jobs created during the same period of 2022.

The number of unfilled jobs for IT pros shrank from more than 200,000 in December to just over 120,000 at the end of July, Janco’s latest report showed. It argued that the growth of the IT job market stopped in January, with a loss of 2,600 positions, with other losses piling up in succeeding months.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals are poor at best,” Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis said in a statement.

In the second quarter of 2023, the “big losers” were computer system design jobs (down 10,500); telecommunications (down 5,500);  content providers (down 4,700); and other information service providers (down 6,600). Janulaitis said.

Many roles, especially in telecommunications and cloud providers are being automated and eliminated, he said. CIOs and CFOs are looking to improve the productivity of IT by automating processes and reporting where possible and focusing on eliminating “non-essential” managers, staff, and services.

“Experienced coders and developers still have opportunities. The highest demand continues to be for security professionals, programmers, and blockchain processing IT Pros,” Janulaitis said.

As part of an effort to boost return on investment, CIOs are looking to consolidate the cloud service providers they support.

“This will impact the job prospects at those providers,” Janulaitis said. “There continues to be a general belief there will be an economic downturn by many CIOs and CFOs. This is impacting all decisions around hiring new IT pros and increasing technology-related expenditures. This has impacted the salaries of IT pros with a major impact on the compensation of IT executives.”

Meanwhile, according to CompTIA, the strongest demand was for software developers and engineers, IT project managers, data analysts, IT support specialists and emerging technologies. Positions in emerging technologies or jobs that require emerging tech skills accounted for about 23% of all tech job postings in July.

Within the emerging tech category, 35% of job postings referenced artificial intelligence (AI) work and skills, CompTIA said. 

June 2023

IT workers are well positioned to not only keep their jobs but to get big bumps in pay when looking for new opportunities, according to analysis of jobs data released today by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Overall, the US unemployment rate dropped slightly from 3.7% in May to 3.6% in June, with about 206,000 jobs added, according to the BLS. The number of jobs added last month was down 100,000 from May.

Wages also increased as employers continued to struggle to find workers. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees grew 4.4% in June over the same period last year to $28.83, according to the BLS.

Tech sector companies increased headcount by 5,348 jobs last month, according to an analysis of BLS data by industry group CompTIA. Among the six top tech occupation categories, three have shown positive gains through the first half of 2023: IT and custom software services and systems design; PC, semiconductor and components manufacturing; and cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting.

Overall, however, tech occupations throughout the economy declined by an estimated 171,000, according to CompTIA. The unemployment rate for tech jobs edged up from 2% to 2.3%, still well below the national unemployment figure.

Software developers were in particularly in high demand, according to CompTIA. Job openings had dropped by more than 2,700 positions in May, but in June software development positions rose by more than 15,700 openings. Job openings for IT project managers and data scientists also lept in June, up by 8,633 and 3,929, respectively.

Other IT positions that saw marked increases included system analysts, IT support specialists, web developers, cybersecurity analysts and engineers, and database adminitrators, according to CompTIA.

Overall, tech-related employment mirrored June’s overall easing of the labor market nationally, CompTIA said. Tech occupations throughout the economy fell back and job postings for future hiring were down modestly, with jobs offering remote/hybrid work arrangements falling off even as opportunities to work with artificial intelligence rose in the emerging job market.

“The latest tech employment figures do lag some, but the underlying fundamentals remain unchanged. All signs point to a continuation of the growth trajectory for the tech workforce,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer, CompTIA, said in a statement.

Ahead of the BLS jobs report, HR software provider ADP released its own jobs report Thursday saying private sector jobs surged by 497,000 in June, well ahead of the 267,000 gain in May and much higher than the 220,000 analysts had estimated.

“According to the Department of Labor, [ADP’s] numbers were way off,” said Jamie Kohn, senior director of human resources research at Gartner. “I do think we’re seeing a slight slowdown in jobs at the moment, but there’s such a shortage of talent, companies are trying to keep up.”

Employment rates for prime age workers — 18- to 54-year-olds — is back to pre-Covid numbers and companies are reticent to make further cuts even as economists continue to chirp about a possible recession.

“We have data that shows on median, people are getting a 15% increase when they move from one job to another,” Kohn said. “They’re actually getting higher pay bumps than they thought they would.” On average, most job seekers expect an 8% increase in pay in a new job, according to a new Gartner survey.

Another trend putting pressure on the job market is an increasing number of Baby Boomer retirements, leaving management positions and other senior jobs unfilled.

“We’re about half way through Baby Boomer [generation] retirement. The market is likely to get tighter as the latter half of the Baby Boomer generation retires over the next decade or so. Some people also retired early during and coming out of the pandemic,” Kohn said. “I’m hearing from a lot of HR leaders who are trying to figure out how to convince people to delay retirement because they’re finding it hard to find people.”

IT workers in particular are in demand, Kohn said. The Gartner survey showed 78% of job market candidates have multiple offers on the table. That compares to overall job seekers, 72% of whom had multiple job offers.

While organizations across all US industries are expected to boost hiring in the third quarter, employers in the IT market have the most aggressive hiring plans, according to global staffing firm ManpowerGroup.

Unmet demand for talent is highest in IT-related fields, with 78% of employers in IT reporting challenges in hiring, according to an earlier report from ManpowerGroup. This suggests that tech workers who find themselves laid off will soon be reabsorbed into the market.

ManpowerGroup’s real-time data is showing plentiful opportunities in logistics, job openings grew 25% this quarter, sales and business development were up 10%, medical (up 9%) and finance (up 8%).

“We’re seeing the relationship between employers and workers continue to evolve, particularly for workers with in-demand skills,” Becky Frankiewicz, ManpowerGroup’s regional president and chief commercial officer, said. “As ‘pandemic paranoia’ about hiring lingers, companies are holding on to their workers as layoffs calm and permanent roles are more in demand than temporary.”

Hybrid work is also on the uptick, with all industries offering more remote/hybrid roles month-over-month and tech remote work up 34%-40% in June, according to ManpowerGroup. And as the relentless advance of AI continues, employers are betting on people. Companies are investing in the talent and skills they have in house, with organizations re-skilling and up-skilling more than ever.

After some high-profile layoffs by tech companies this year and last, many IT workers are seeking employment in industries they consider more stable, such as financial services, according to Kohn.

Workforce participation by women remains lower than for men. A key reason for that is US employers are not as generous with flexible work, paid maternal leave and childcare assistance as their European counterparts.

“If you have to spend half or more of your income for childcare, no reason to go back to work,” Kohn said, adding that what’s needed is an overhaul of worker benefits rights by the federal government. Another wrinkle: US immigration has seen steep declines — even before the pandemic — further reducing the chance for a glut in job openings.

May 2023

Like April before it, the month of May showed mixed results for tech employment in the US.

Technology companies shed an estimated 4,725 jobs — a figure that includes nontechnical workers — in May, according to an analysis of the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures by IT industry group CompTIA. Job postings for open technology positions also eased off, down to about 234,000 from April’s 300,000, according to a new report from CompTIA.

At the same time, however, the number of technology jobs throughout the economy rose by 45,000, according to the report.

Those mixed results for the tech workforce reflect the unpredictability of the overall labor market. US employers added a stronger-than-expected 339,000 jobs in May, but the overall US unemployment rate rose by 0.3 percentage points to hit 3.7%, while the number of unemployed people rose by 440,000 to reach 6.1 million, according to BLS data released today.

Responding to the BLS data, global staffing firm ManpowerGroup also commented on the mixed results for tech pros: “Our data shows cooling in IT, with posted roles down 12% compared to last month. Yet those let go are being quickly reabsorbed, often into midsize companies.”

Indeed, while the national unemployment rate has ranged between 3.4% and 3.7% since March 2022, the unemployment rate for tech occupations has hovered near 2% throughout that time frame. In fact, tech unemployment decreased slightly in May, from 2.1% to 2.0%, according to CompTIA’s analysis of the BLS data.

“Reassuringly, the positives for the month outweigh the negatives, confirming the tech workforce remains on solid footing,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.

The most in-demand roles among tech job postings include software developers and engineers; IT project managers, data analysts, and other emerging tech roles; IT support specialists; systems analysts and engineers; and data scientists. Approximately 20% of job postings are in emerging tech fields or require emerging tech skills, including nearly 15,000 postings that mention AI skills, according to CompTIA.

April 2023

Technology companies added 18,795 workers in April, the largest number since August 2022, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures and an industry analysis of that information.

The data revealed a mixed bag of results for tech workers last month. Technology jobs throughout the economy declined by 99,000 positions even as employer job postingspassed 300,000 — a level last reached in October, according to a report from CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

Both the overall US unemployment rate, at 3.4%, and the number of unemployed, at 5.7 million, changed little in April, according to BLS data released today. The national unemployment rate has ranged between 3.4% and 3.7% since March 2022.

The unemployment rate for tech occupations inched up to 2.3% in April from 2.2% in March, still well below the national unemployment rate, according to CompTIA’s evaluation.

“It was another all-too-familiar month of mixed labor market signals,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The surprisingly strong tech sector employment gains were offset by the pause in tech hiring across the economy.”

Still, IT executives and managers are among the most highly paid workers in US corporations, according to a new report based on the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

A BLS report published last last month — the Occupational Employment and Wages Summary for 2022 — showed computer and information research scientists earn on average about $155,880 a year. Database architects are the second-highest earners with just over $136,540 in annual compensation. Software developers followed at $132,000 a year.

Putting upward pressure on wages has been a combination of scarce tech talent and low unemployement rates.

Computer and IT managers are among the most highly paid positions in the US, earning an average $173,670 across all industries and occupations; that’s even more than the top executives in all industries and occupations ($129,050), according to business consultancy Janco Associate.

In terms of employment in the tech industry, software developers held just over 1.5 million positions in the US, more than double the 700,000 positions held by computer user support specialists. Computer systems analysts, with 500,000 jobs, were in third place, according to Janco’s report.

Late last month, job search website Lensa published a research study showing “computer occupations” are among the most in-demand jobs in the US, second only to “health diagnostic and treatment practitioners.” More than 3.1 million potential applicants clicked on open job positions in the IT arena, according to Lensa.

Overall, the number of workers not in the labor force who currently want a job increased by 346,000 over the month to 5.3 million, according to the BLS. “These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the four weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job,” the BLS said.

Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.6%, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.4%, were unchanged in April. These measures remain below their pre-pandemic February 2020 levels, 63.3%and 61.1%, respectively.

Global Staffing firm ManpowerGroup viewed the BLS data from April as a “promise of spring” for the job market, with a higher-than-expected 253,000 jobs added.

Employers continue to hire for in-demand skills while pulling back on non-essential headcount, the company said in a statement to Computerworld. The company also noted some negative trends that emerged with the BLS’s revisions to its March data showing 100,000 fewer jobs, “and the three-month average is tracking down.”

“Today, we’re seeing very concentrated demand with medical, IT, and sales representing 44% of all open positions,” Becky Frankiewicz. president of ManpowerGroup North America said. “That data includes all real-time available jobs across the country. [Job] openings are the lowest they’ve been in two years.”

Employers listed more than 300,000 job postings for tech positions in April, signaling demand for tech talent continues to hold up, according to CompTIA. In March, there were 316,000 tech job openings.

Within the tech sector, three occupation categories paced April hiring, led by IT services and custom software development (+12,700 additional jobs). Job gains were also reported in cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting (+7,300 additional jobs) and PC, semiconductor and components manufacturing (+3,200 additional jobs).

Employer job postings for tech positions were widely dispersed geographically and by industry. Employers in administrative and support (32,861), finance and insurance (32,820) and manufacturing (31,959) were among the most active last month.

The number of tech job postings that specify remote work or hybrid work arrangements as an option continued to trend upward in April, with more than 65,000 positions across the country; software developers, IT project managers, data analysts and jobs in emerging technologies topped the list

Among metropolitan markets, Washington, DC, New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago had the highest volumes of tech job postings. And Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Boston and Seattle saw the largest month-over-month increases in postings, according to CompTIA.

March 2023

Tech sector employment, which includes all workers on the payrolls of tech companies, declined in March by an estimated 839 jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and IT industry group CompTIA.

Employer job postings for tech positions for March, however, increased by 76,546 month-over-month, for a total of 316,000 openings; the tech unemployment rate remained unchanged from February at 2.2%.

Technology employment across all industry sectors increased by an estimated 197,000 positions for the month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of BLS data. “This represents the highest level of employer hiring activity as measured by job postings in seven months,” CompTIA said in its Tech Jobs Report.

More than 4.18 million people are now employed as IT professionals in the US, according to industry research firm Janco Associates.

“As a forward-looking indicator, the rebound in employer tech job postings is a notable positive,” said Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer. “While caution is in order given the state of uncertainty, the data suggests segments of employers may be stepping back into the tech talent market.”

Overall, the US economy added 236,000 jobs in March, according to the BLS, a slight slowdown compared to recent months; that could mean the jobs market may be responding to recent interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve.

At the same time the number of jobs being added to the economy dropped slightly, the overall unemployment rate dipped a tenth of a point to 3.5%, remaining near 50-year historic lows.

IT industry advocacy group CompTIA’s March Tech Jobs Report.

The total number of unemployed US workers, at 5.8 million, changed little in March; that measure has shown little net movement since early 2022, according to BLS data.

“The labor market posted solid if not spectacular gains,” Diane Swonk, chief economist and managing director at KPMG LLP, wrote in a blog post. “Hiring in both the public and the private sectors slowed. Hiring by firms with less than 250 workers continues to drive gains in the private sector. Those firms are the most vulnerable to the recent tightening of credit conditions,”

Even as unemployment remains low, there have been a number of high-profile layoffs in the technology industry and elsewhere during the past six or so months; industry experts have said many organizations over-hired during the COVID-19 pandemic and are now having to trim their workforces, a so-called “course correction.”

This year, more than 168,000 workers have been laid off at tech firms, according to industry tracker Layoffs.fyi.

Last month, job search site Indeed fired 15% of its workforce, or about 2,200 employees. The layoffs came from nearly every team and function within the company, CEO Chris Hyams said, and were in response to a job market that has cooled “after the recent post-COVID boom,” he said.

“US total job openings were down 3.5% year-over-year, while sponsored job volumes were down 33%,” Hyams said. “In the US, we are expecting job openings will likely decrease to pre-pandemic levels of about 7.5 million, or even lower over the next two to three years.”

While big tech firms such as Google and Microsoft may be letting workers go, the layoffs aren’t dominated by IT talent. Most of the layoffs are occurring on the business side of the corporate world. In fact, there are fewer IT workers than job openings — a lot fewer.

Positions for software developers and engineers accounted for the largest share of job postings in March, according to CompTIA. Employers are also in the market for IT support specialists, systems engineers and analysts, IT project managers, cybersecurity analysts, and engineers. About one in five tech job postings offer remote or hybrid work arrangements as an option.

A new report from global staffing firm ManpowerGroup found that 77% of employers report difficultly filling job roles, representing a 17-year talent shortage high.

James Neave, head of data science at job search site Adzuna, said despite the latest spate of layoffs, which include Apple and Walmart, job growth has exceeded expectations for 12 consecutive months, “the longest streak since 1998.

“Today’s closely watched jobs report gives another healthy reading on the job market and the strength of hiring,” he said invia email to Computerworld.

On Adzuna, advertised job vacancies in the U.S. totalled 8.3 million in March. As a result, organizations need to continue working to attract and retain highly qualified talent amid shortages and skills gaps, Neave said.

“To win workers, organizations are improving their benefits and providing care for the whole person in such a stressful economic time,” he said. “Boosting benefit offerings also helps to slow staff turnover and reduce the risk of burnout, improving morale as well as the bottom line.” 

February 2023

Tech sector employment fell by 11,184 positions in February, a modest reduction of 0.2% of the total tech industry workforce of more than 5.5 million.

Unemployment in the tech sector also jumped from 1.5% in January to 2.2%, in February, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

The unemployment rate for tech occupations is still below the national rate of 3.6%, which saw a .1% increase from January.

The number of technology occupations in all industries declined by .6% or 38,000 positions, according to CompTIA’s report. Tech occupations in the US economy still total more than 6.4 million workers. Among all tech industries, tech manufacturing added a net new 2,800 jobs, the fifth consecutive month of positive gains.

Employer job postings for tech positions also declined by about 40,000, to just over 229,000 in February. Most metropolitan markets experienced fallbacks from January to February, with a few exceptions, according to CompTIA.

“As expected, the lag in labor market data means prior layoffs announcements are now appearing in BLS reporting,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer for  CompTIA. “Context is critical. The recent pullback represents a relatively small fraction of the massive tech workforce. The long-term outlook remains unchanged with demand for tech talent powering employment gains across the economy.”

While there have been hundreds of highly publicized layoffs among tech companies, the vast majority of employees being fired are not in IT positions, according to industry analysts. In fact, there remains a dearth in tech talent to fill more than 145,000 IT job openings. 

IT consultancy Janco Associates offered a somewhat more pessimistic view of the IT job market.

“Layoffs, for the most part, did not hit developers. Rather they were focused on data center operations, administrative and HR roles related to recruiting, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). Some roles, especially in telecommunications and data center operations are being automated and eliminated,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. “Driving this is CIOs and CFOs who are looking to improve the productivity of IT by automating processes and reporting where possible. They are focusing on eliminating non-essential managers and staff. They will continue to hire coders and developers.”

The highest demand, Janulaitis said, continues to be for security professionals, programmers, and blockchain processing IT professionals. Other industry research shows data analysts and AI professionals are also in high demand. 

“The general belief there will be an economic downturn is high for many CIOs and CFOs. This is impacting all decisions around hiring new IP pros and increasing technology-related expenditures,” Janulaitis said.

In 2022, 267,000 new jobs were added to the IT market. Those new jobs were in addition to the 213,000 jobs created in 2021.

In 2023, while there are more jobs being added, that number is declining. In January, for example, for the first time in 25 months, there was a net loss in the number of jobs in the IT Job Market. That trend is continuing, Janco said. In the first two months of 2023, the IT job market shrank by 44,900 jobs.

“CIOs and CFOs have started to slow the rate of creating new IT jobs and hiring IT professionals,” Janco said in its report. “The three month moving average for IT job market growth trend for IT professionals shows a significant downward trend. Inflation and recessionary trends are driving this.”

Layoffs and economic uncertainty drove CIOs and CFOs to slow IT hiring in February, according to Janulaitis.

“Layoffs at big tech companies are having an adverse on overall IT hiring. More CIOs are looking at a troubling economic climate and are evaluating the need for increased headcounts based on the technological requirements of their specific business operations,”Janulaitis said.

The growth of the IT job market stopped with a decline of 10,000 jobs in January and 13,400 jobs in February, according to Janco. That was the first loss in the number of IT Pros employed in over 27 months. The three-month moving average of IT job market growth went negative with a trend line that shows a further decay in IT job market growth.”

Overall US employment rose by 311,000 jobs in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said. That was vastly higher than the 225,000 jobs predicted by economists polled by the Wall Street Journal. In January, about half a million jobs were added, according to BLS data.

The number of people quitting jobs (3.9 million) decreased, in February, while layoffs and other firings (1.7 million) increased. Even with the unemployment rate ticking up slightly, are still nearly two jobs (10.8 million) for every unemployed worker (5.9 million), according to a BLS data. In 2022, the annual average number of job openings was 11.2 million.

Last month, U.S. consumer spending also rose to its highest level in over nearly two years.

Across all industries, the number of people who were without jobs for a short period of time (less than 5 weeks) increased by 343,000 to 2.3 million in February, offsetting a decrease in the prior month. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), changed little in February and accounted for 17.6% of the total unemployed or 1.1 million people.

Job postings for technology positions rose the most in scientific and tech services industry sector (35,257), finance and insurance (24,735) and manufacturing (20,246).

Overall, in the US job market, the average hourly earnings grew 4.6% year-over-year, which was down from last year but above the pre-pandemic pace, BLS data showed.

The ongoing tech talent shortage also lifted IT salaries, but future pay increases will be less than expected, according to Janco Associates.

On average, IT salaries rose by 5.61% in 2022 and were expected to increase by as much as 8% this year, according to earlier reports by Janco. 

“Many CIOs’ 2023 IT budgets planned to increase salaries for IT pros to address the inflationary pressures faced by employees are now being reviewed,” Janulaitis said. “Given these facts, we believe that median salaries for IT pros in 2023 will be 3% to 4% salary above 2022 levels, not the 7% to 8% that was budgeted.” 

The mean compensation for all IT pros in 2023 is now $101,323; for IT pros in large enterprises it tops $102,000; and for executives it averages $180,000.

“Companies that do not live up to employees’ expectations may find that even if they are able to get candidates in the door, those candidates leave as soon as a better offer comes along,” Gartner Research analyst Mbula Schoen wrote in a Q&A post this week.. “Additionally, there are increasingly opportunities for IT jobs outside traditional tech companies, so it’s important to look beyond just the tech provider community to truly grasp the state of the tech talent crunch.”

January 2023

The unemployment rate in the technology job market decreased for the second month in a row, dropping to 1.5% in January from 1.8% in December.

Even with the marked drop in unemployment, it was a mixed bag for the technology marketplace, after the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued its January jobs report on Friday. There was a decline in current employment and an increase in employer job postings for potential future hiring, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

While the overall US unemployment rate dropped to a figure not seen since 1969 (to 3.4%, from 3.5% a month earlier), the number of technology workers hired in January fell into negative territory for the first time in more than two years. Technology occupations throughout the economy declined by 32,000 for the month, representing a reduction of -0.5%, according to CompTIA. Technology companies also shed 2,489 positions in January, according to CompTIA.

Overall, however, the US added 517,000 jobs in January, according to BLS numbers.

The BLS also said on Friday it had significantly revised its November data, describing it as a “major revision reflecting content and coding changes.”

In November 2022, the BLS indicated U.S. technology companies added approximately 2,500 net new jobs versus the mistakenly reported decrease of 151,900 jobs in earlier reporting.

“The change materially affects the sub-sector of tech companies providing search and platform services, while the revisions were a net positive for sub-sectors such as IT services and data,” CompTIA said.

ComTIA also uses employer online job posting data to predict the number of job postings for future tech hiring, and that number reversed last month’s dip and increased by 22,408 to 268,898 for 2023.

The fact that the unemployment rate in the tech market still dropped in January indicates many laid off workers were re-hired and absorbed back into the labor market, according to CompTIA. The tech unemployment rate is also an indication that many of the layoffs occurring within technology organizations are non-technical workers, such as sales, marketing or related business support positions.

Among industries, the highest volumes of job postings for tech positions were reported in the professional, scientific and technical services (40,712), finance and insurance (30,576) and manufacturing (24,269) sectors.

“Despite the unusual backward revision by the BLS and the routine fluctuations in monthly labor market data, much of the big picture tech employment picture remains the same,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA said in a statement. “Undoubtedly, some companies over- hired and are now scaling back. The low tech unemployment rate and steady hiring activity by employers confirms the long-term demand for tech talent across many sectors of the economy.”

While tech companies shed employees over the past few months in highly publicized reports, overall, 2022 saw an increase of about 264,500 new jobs to the IT job Market, according to IT industry consultancy Janco Associates.  Those new jobs were in addition to the 213,000 jobs created in 2021. 

In January, the growth of the IT job market stopped with a decline of 4,700 jobs.  That was the first loss in over 27 months, according to Janco. The three-month moving average of IT job market growth went negative with a trend line that shows a further decay in IT job market growth. At the same time, there is an excess of 109,000 unfilled jobs for IT Pros due to a lack of qualified candidates.

A lack of qualified candidates has lead to increased demand for tech workers raising overall salaries for all IT positions by 5.6%, with small-and-medium-sized businesses seeing an average increase of 7.74% increase, with their median compensation increasing to $100,434 as reported in Janco’s 2023 IT Salary Survey.

U.S.-based employers announced 102,943 cuts in January, a 136% increase from the 43,651 cuts announced in December, according to global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. That’s 440% higher than the 19,064 cuts announced in the same month in 2022, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s report. Forty-one percent of January’s job cuts were in tech.

Yet demand for those to fill jobs requiring tech skills is rising.

“That’s a ton of expertise missing from an industry that needs the brightest to get brighter,” said Vince Padua, CTO at Axway, a tech company that sells an API management platform.

And it’s going to get worse, he added, as 86% IT leaders expect an expertise gap increase in coming years.

“As cloud computing, AI and microservices are developed and adopted, the skills required to support them constantly evolve,” Padua said. “Companies need more employees with the right skills and experience – plus IT infrastructure and enterprise software experts with specialized skills in cybersecurity, data analytics and cloud architecture.”

IT jobs took the top spot in a list of the 25 best jobs in the US, according to online job site Indeed. The top job slot went to full stack developer, which offers a median annual salary of $130,000 and allows for a mostly remote or hybrid workplace..

Eight tech jobs were among the top 10 positions on Indeed’s list this year; that compares with just two tech jobs in the top 10 on last year’s list. In 2022, tech jobs were moving down the top jobs list; now, a year later, tech jobs are surging upward. This year, 11 of the top 25 jobs, or 44%, were tech positions. By comparison, in 2022, just 25% of the top 25 jobs were tech-related.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals are there but not in as broad in scope as in 2022. Layoffs, for the most part, did not hit developers.  Rather they were focused on data center operations, administrative and HR roles related to recruiting, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion),” said Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis.

Some roles, especially in telecommunications and data center operations are being automated and eliminated, Janulaitis noted, but those operations will continue to hire coders and developers.

The highest demand continues to be for security professionals, programmers, and blockchain processing IT professionals, according to Janco. Currently, there are over 109,000 unfilled jobs in the IT job market — a drop from 216,000 in November.

Janulaitis blamed continued concern over a possible recession as one reason organizations are eliminating jobs.

“More CIOs are looking at a troubling economic climate and are evaluating the need for increased headcounts based on the technological requirements of their specific business operations,” Janulaitis said.

According to the latest BLS data analyzed by Janco, there are now just over 4.2 million jobs for IT Professionals in the US., and layoffs at big tech companies are having an adverse on overall IT hiring.

“The possibility of the economic downturn is very likely and is impacting all decisions that increase technology-related expenditures. Work from home is being minimized as companies are requiring employees to be in the office at least 3 to 4 days a week,” Janulaitis said. “Mid-level managers are now having to justify most positions where the IT Pro is not working in the office.  Companies that are forced to hire replacements, do so with the caveat that payroll costs remain flat. “

The 2023 IT budgets increased salaries for IT pros to address inflationary pressures faced by employees.  Those are now being reviewed. Given those facts, Janco believes that median salaries for IT Pros in 2023 will be 3-4% salary above 2022 levels, not the 7% to 8% that was budgeted at the end of 2022.

“With this as a background, Janco has just revised downward its forecast for the growth of the IT Job Market in 2023 to just over 160,000 from 174,000 new jobs,” Janulaitis said. “That will be less growth than in 2021 and 2022 but still at high levels.”

December 2022

Even as some high-profile layoffs have lead the news over the past few months, the US added 223,000 jobs in December, including 17,600 positions at tech companies, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and other research.

Technology job gains were recorded in four of five sector categories. It’s the 25th straight month of net employment growth in the tech industry, according to a report by CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

The overall US unemployment rate dropped from 3.7% in November 2022 to 3.5% in December, according to BLS data. In the technology sector, the unemployment rate dropped from 2% in November to 1.8% in December, according to CompTIA.

“Another wave of positive tech employment data speaks to the many moving parts of a complex labor market,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “Despite the layoffs there continues to be more employers hiring tech talent than shedding it.”

CompTIA’s analysis also showed that 30% of all tech jobs postings are for positions in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, or in roles requiring emerging tech skills.

Within the tech sector, three occupation categories lead December hiring: IT services and custom software development (+7,200 jobs), other information services, including search engines (+6,600 jobs) and data processing, hosting and related services (+5,600 jobs).

CompTIA

The positive news was countered by a second consecutive month of lower employer job postings for future tech hiring. Future tech hiring is one metric CompTIA uses to predict how many job openings will be available over the next year. Future tech hiring declined for the second consecutive month, but still totaled more than 246,000 in December, down from 270,000 in November, 2022.

Also, the organization cautioned, recent layoff announcements by technology companies may not show up immediately in government reports, such as today’s BLS “employment situation” report, a CompTIA spokesperson said.

In spite of that, in the first quarter of 2023, the IT industry will lead all others in hirings, according to a new report from global staffing firm ManpowerGroup.

While companies are expected to hire fewer technology workers this quarter than the previous one (6% less) or even Q1, 2022 (14% less), ManpowerGroup’s survey of just under 39,000 employers in 41 countries revealed overall there will be a 23% increase in hiring.

ManpowerGroup

When considering how staffing levels will change during the first quarter, employers in 39 of 41 countries and territories surveyed anticipate a net positive hiring outlook, the report stated.

Organizations in the IT industry reported the most optimistic outlook for Q1, 2023 with an expected 35% increase in hiring; that was followed by Financials & Real Estate (28%), and Energy & Utilities (+26%).​

Geographically, North American organizations expect to increase hiring by 31%; US organizations expect a 29% increase in hiring and Canadian organizations expect at 34% increase. Large organizations with more than 250 are more than twice as optimistic as small businesses (with less than 10 employees) to hire in the coming quarter with outlooks of 29% and 13%, respectively.

Wanting to hire is one thing and actually being able to find tech talent is another. Currently, there is a dearth of tech talent available.

Despite strong optimism to hire, the industry faces a talent shortage where 76% of IT industry employers report difficulty finding the hard and soft skills needed, according to ManpowerGroup’s survey.

“This recovery is unlike any we have ever seen [and] demand for skills is at record highs in many markets, and unemployment levels remain high while workforce participation stagnates,” the report said.

ManpowerGroup

Because of the lack of available talent, the lead time for filling an open IT position is now several months, according to a new report by business consultancy Janco Associates.

“If the position to be filled is a replacement for some who has left the enterprise, training time has to be factored in. This is just one of the issues faced by CIOs,” Janco stated in its 2023 IT Salary Survey, which included interviews more than 142 CIOs, CFOs, and HR professionals to identify key CIO staffing Issues

Organizations have addressed hiring challenges by removing college degree requirements from job postings and by creating apprenticeship programs to train new candidates.

“With the limited labor supply of IT professionals, every hiring mistake is magnified,” Janco’s report stated.

Janco Associates

In Janco’s review of hiring failures based on survey responses, it found two factors that stood out over others. Interpersonal issues associated with these failures (29%) and poor corporate culture fit (28%) with the others. Those issues, Janco argued, can mostly be filtered out during the recruiting and interviewing process.

November 2022

For two straight years, the technology sector has added jobs every month.

In November, US tech companies added 14,400 workers, and tech jobs in all industry sectors grew by 137,000 positions, according to a new report from CompTIA

While the needle on overall US unemployment remained unchanged in November at 3.7%, for the technology sector it dropped to 2% from 2.2% in October, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures compiled by CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

CompTIA

So far this year, tech industry jobs grew by 207,000 positions, according to BLS data.

“The hotter-than-anticipated tech jobs report confirms there are still many more employers hiring tech talent than shedding it,” said Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer. “It’s certainly premature to dismiss concerns over the health of the economy, but this should be a reassuring sign for the tech workforce.”

The growth in the tech sector belies an economy beset by high inflation and what many still believe is an impending recession. And although inflation slowed to 7.7%, it is still well over the 2% target set by policymakers at the Federal Reserve Bank.

In November, nearly a dozen big name companies announced layoffs — some in the thousands, including Amazon, Cisco and HP. But experts believe the targeted layoffs, which have been ongoing over the past three months, are mostly a result of poor hiring strategies.

Due to a dearth of tech talent over the past two years, companies rushed to hire, bringing in a raft of tech workers with seven to 10 years’ experience and highly specialized skills.

On top of that, the companies tended to pay two to three times more than what they would have for someone with less experience but with the right education, aptitude, and attitude to be part of a sustainable workforce, according to Tony Lysak, CEO of The Software Institute, which offers IT consulting and education services.

“We need them, and can’t get them, so let’s pay more,” said Lysak, summing up how many companies have approached hiring during the past two years.

According to IT employment consultancy Janco Associates, the latest BLS data shows there are now just shy of four million jobs for IT professionals in the US. Janco sees this trend of IT jobs increases continuing but at a slower pace in the future. Layoffs will continue as companies seek to improve productivity levels.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals will continue to be positive but not as broad in scope as in the first three quarters of this calendar year,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. “CIOs and CFOs are looking to improve the productivity of IT. They are focusing on eliminating ‘non-essential’ managers and staff. They will continue to hire coders and developers. The highest demand continues to be for programmers, blockchain processing, and security professionals. There still are over 200K unfilled jobs in the IT job market.”

IT salaries for existing IT staff and middle managers increased by just under 3% while new hires were paid 5% to 6% more than existing staff, according to Janco’s Mid Year 2022 IT Salary Survey. “In conversation with several CIOs, we observed that starting pay rates for new hires were in the 8% to 10% range a few months back, but this is not the case currently,” Janulaitis said.

November hiring by technology companies was broad-based across occupation categories, led by IT services and custom software development (+8,100). Employment growth also occurred in data processing, hosting and related services (+4,100), other information services, including search engines (+2,100), and computer and electronic products manufacturing (+1,900).

CompTIA

Employer job postings for future tech hiring fell back in November, but still totaled nearly 270,000. Openings for software developers and engineers accounted for about 28% of all tech jobs postings. Demand for IT support specialists, systems engineers, IT project managers, and network engineers was also solid.

While major tech hubs recorded the largest numbers of job postings for tech positions, ‘under the radar’ markets showed notable increases in employment opportunities, including Topeka, Kan.; Virginia Beach, Va.; Worcester, Mass.; and Riverside, Calif. Among industries, the professional, scientific, and technical services sector had the most tech job postings (41,188), followed by finance and insurance (35,132) and manufacturing (31,036).

CompTIA

CompTIA’s analysis also showed 30% of all tech jobs postings are for positions in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, or in roles that require emerging tech skills.

Janco’s report also shows corporate executives are challenged by inflation and the economic downturn. Those executives are reluctant to hire replacement employees at salaries that are significantly higher than those who left as part of the Great Resignation. In their 2023 salary budgets for IT pros, “CIOs are trying to address the inflationary pressures faced by employees. We believe that starting salaries for IT Pros in 2023 will be 6% to 7% salary above existing levels,” Janulaitis said.

October 2022

Tech firms in October hired between 15,300 and 20,700 workers (depending on who’s doing the counting), marking roughly two straight years of hiring growth in the industry, according to two new employment reports.

So far this year, tech industry employment has increased by 193,900 jobs, 28% higher than the same period in 2021, according to a jobs report from CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce. 

In contrast, technology job postings by tech and non-tech companies had been on a five-month downward slide until last month. Tech workers employed throughout the economy, regardless of industry, declined by 116,000 last month, according to CompTIA. CompTIA’s report is based on the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.

“The data is roughly in line with expectations,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “Tech hiring activity remains steady, but there are undoubtedly concerns of a slowing economy.”

CompTIA

In October, the number of tech workers employed throughout all industries grew by 10,000 over the previous month, according to CompTIA.

Most of the issues affecting the economy are due to supply chain problems, according to Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, which also released its IT jobs report on Friday.

“If China opens up and supply chains will improve, that should lessen the recessionary pressures that are driving the tech giants to reduce staff,” Janulaitis said in a statement. “Also, the results of the election in the US will provide an opportunity to improve the economic climate.”

Tech job postings reflect the total of “help wanted” ads companies listed last month. There were 317,000 such postings in October, according to CompTIA. It was the first time since April 2022 that the number of job postings increased over the prior month.

CompTIA also noted that tech manufacturing employment is up 43% compared to the same period last year.

CompTIA

While the tech industry unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 2.2% in October from 2.1% in September, it remained well below the overall US unemployment rate, according to CompTIA’s report. The overall US unemployment rate also ticked up to 3.7% in October.

CompTIA’s jobs report differs somewhat from Janco Associates’s figures. Janco reported 15,300 new hires by tech companies in October; that compares to 13,700 job listings added by the tech industry the previous month.

There are now a total of 3.98 million jobs for IT professionals in the US, according to the BLS data analyzed by Janco.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals will continue to be positive, but not as broad in scope as in the first three quarters of 2022,” Janulaitis said in a statement. “CIOs and CFOs are looking to improve the productivity of IT.  That means they are focusing on eliminating “non-essential” managers and staff. They will continue to hire coders and developers.”

CompTIA

The highest demand in IT will be for programmers, blockchain processing, and security professionals, according to Janulaitis. Much of the hiring will be limited to filling positions that have been approved and are unfilled — not staff expansion.

Within the tech industry, the bulk of new hiring occurred in three sector categories, according to CompTIA:

• IT services and custom software development (+8,800)
• Other information services, including search engines (+6,800)
• Computer and electronic products manufacturing (+5,400)

In Janco’s mid-year 2022 IT Salary Survey, it found IT salaries for existing IT staff and middle managers increased by just under 3%, while new hires were paid 5% to 6% more than existing staff.  “In conversation with several CIOs, we observed that starting pay rates for new hires were in the 8%-10% range a few months back, but this is not the case currently,” Janulaitis said.

The disparity in pay between veteran IT workers and new hires is a point of contention and has likely led to some problems in worker motivation, according to Sinem Buber, lead economist with ZipRecruiter. When new employees are hired, they often come in with pay and benefits equal to or better than veteran employees. Even as companies have raised wages, it’s often across the board, ignoring seniority.

“So, the link between hard work and raises is broken,” Buber said.

CompTIA Remote work hiring trends on the upswing

Remote work shows no signs of slowing down, according to CompTIA. Employer job postings for tech positions that specify remote work or work-from-home options continue to increase, with a year-to-date rate of 34% compared to 27% in 2021, and 22% in 2020.

Major tech hubs saw significant month-over-month increases in tech jobs postings, including Boston (+2,732), New York City (+1,459), San Francisco (+884) and San Jose (+864). The top industries for tech job postings were professional, scientific, and technical services (50,688); finance and insurance (35,500); and manufacturing (34,488), according to CompTIA.

Positions for software developers and engineers led the October job postings (85,796). “There is also strong demand for IT support specialists, IT project managers, systems engineers and network engineers,” CompTIA said.

September 2022: Janco analysis

IT job growth has continued each month for over a year, and in the last 12 months 202,800 jobs have been added, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor data, which was analyzed by IT consultancy Janco Associates.

At the same time, CIOs and CFOs have started to slow the rate at which they’re creating new IT jobs and hiring due to inflation and recession fears, according to Janco’s latest report.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals will continue to be positive, but not as broad in scope as in the first nine months of 2022,” said M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates. “CIOs are still posturing to hire staff and expand technologies to address blockchain processing and security applications based on market conditions. However, most hiring will be limited to filling positions open due to attrition, not staff expansion.”

U.S. tech firms added workers for the 22nd consecutive month, and companies across the economy hired an estimated 84,000 new tech workers in September, according to the latest Tech Jobs Report from CompTIA.

Job postings for new hiring were down 12% from August, but still totaled just over 300,000. Positions in software development and engineering, tech support, tech project management, systems engineering, and network engineering were in highest demand, according to CompTIA.

CompTIA

About 30% of all postings were for positions in emerging technologies or in jobs that require emerging tech skills. Positions that offer remote work or work from home as an option surpassed 109,000.

Another new report by UK-based job search engine Hired showed that, unlike 2021, when companies were hiring faster than in years prior, the overall time to hire job seekers in 2022 slowed across the US, UK, and Canada. UK companies are now taking 68 days on average to fill open positions. US companies aren’t moving much faster, taking 60 days (up from 52 days in 2021). In Canada, it’s now 54 days. (Remote roles took 40 days to fill – that’s slower than in 2021, but the shortest time to hire overall, Hired said.

“Why? It’s not clear yet,” Hired said in its report. “Are jobseekers taking longer to evaluate opportunities? Or are employers moving candidates through the funnel more carefully? While this indicates an increase in the time to fill roles, it doesn’t equal an overall slowdown in tech hiring.”

Data from Hired indicates employers offering remote roles have a hiring edge over those requiring hybrid or on-site jobs. Since June 2021, candidates showed a preference for remote-only roles.

In January, 18% of active jobseekers indicated they only wanted remote roles. By May, preference for “only remote” roles climbed to 31% of all active jobseekers on Hired’s platform, and rose another percentage point to 32% in June. By June, 93% of candidates showed a preference for remote or hybrid jobs.

Janco Associates

Throughout the year, IT salaries in the US and Canada (except for junior candidates with less than two years of experience) saw significant growth. Mid-level US candidates with four to six years of experience saw the biggest jump from $146,000 to $154,000 between 2021 and 2022. Remote salaries for all candidates, except the most junior, also saw significant growth; on average they jumped by $7,000 to $8,000 from 2021 to 2022.

CompTIA September 2022: CompTIA analysis

Tech companies added 25,500 workers last month, one of the strongest hiring months so far this year, according to new data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and industry analysts.

So far this year, employment in the tech industry has increased by 175,700 jobs, 46% ahead of 2021 — and 92% ahead of 2019, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce. (The total includes all employees —technical and non-technical — on the payrolls of tech companies.)

“Stability in tech hiring continues to be an over-arching theme this year,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “Despite all the economic noise and pockets of layoffs, aggregate tech hiring remains consistently positive.”

According to the latest BLS data, analyzed by IT consultancy Janco Associates, there are now 3.97 million jobs for IT Professionals in the US. For 24 months in a row, there has been an increase in the number of jobs added to the IT job market. Janco sees this trend continuing, according to its latest report released Friday.

CompTIA

The unemployment rate for tech occupations rose to 2.3% in August from 1.7% in July, according to CompTIA. There are likely two reasons for it jump: the overall US unemployment rate increased, as well, and some large tech firms announced layoffs, Herbert noted.

“The other component is we’ve seen a rebound in consumer confidence and worker confidence,” Herbert said. “So, it can also be attributed to tech workers feeling a renewed sense of confidence, and so they’ve quit their job and they’re looking for new opportunities. That was far more prominent earlier this year and last year with the ‘Great Resignation.’”

The number of workers quitting their jobs remained above 4 million in August, according to BLS data. Since June 2021, more than 4 million people have quit every month, according to BLS data, giving rise to the trend known as the Great Resignation. The trend reflects a deep dissatisfaction by many workers with their employment situations. The ongoing global pandemic pushed workers to rethink their careers, work/life balance, long-term goals, and working conditions.

Overall employer job postings for tech positions eased in August to just under 320,000 from 372,000 in July, with 31% of jobs posted last month for positions in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT, or in roles that require emerging tech skills, such as data analytics and automation software.

“A lot of the technology is mature enough now that a lot of positions are implementing automation solutions, robotic process automation,” Herbert said. “Next-generation roles include cybersecurity, and broad categories of automation, so, marketing automation and HR automation.”

From January through August 2022, tech job postings where employers specify remote work or work from home as an option were up 56% over last year —and up 281% from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to CompTIA.

“The one thing that jumped out at me, to no surprise, was the trend toward remote work that I think is now in a semi-permanent state,” Herbert said.

The increase in remote employment was highlighted by the leap in tech job postings in states such as Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, Herbert said.

CompTIA

Even as hiring was up, the number of job openings dropped, indicating the pace of new job vacancies could be slowing, according to Janco Associates. Its data is based on the latest BLS statistics.

There is some slowing in hiring as fears of a significant downturn or recession are on the horizon, Janco’s report stated.

“CIOs and CFOs now are more cautious than they were in the first quarter.  CIOs do not have a clear understanding of how a downturn will impact their bottom line.  Most still are hiring but at a slower pace,”Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis wrote in the report. “Some companies have stopped hiring and started laying off employees.”

“With all that, the IT job market remains tight with an average of 200,000 IT professionals jobs that are not filled due to a lack of qualified candidates,” Janulaitis continued. “The number of unfilled IT jobs has peaked from over 260,000 in April to 210,000 in July. That should still be enough of a buffer to keep hiring of IT pros on a positive track.”

Janco Associates

Janulaitis also said new IT hires are on average receiving salaries that are 5% to 6% above pay for existing positions — and in some cases as much as 10% higher; The higher starting pay is needed to attract the best IT candidates. That salary disparity, however, is driving dissatisfaction and an increase in attrition rate among existing employees, according to Janulaitis.

“The challenge CIOs face will be how to keep the balance between the existing budget, providing salary increases to existing employees that address inflation and higher commuting costs, and having sufficient resources available to achieve the enterprise’s technology and bottom line objectives,” Janulaitis said.

The BLS doesn’t track tech industry jobs directly. Instead, the agency uses the “information sector” as a proxy for tech employment because there are tech jobs in most industries, and therefore technology is not an industry in and of itself.

The nation’s unemployment rate rose from 3.5% to 3.7% in August, with the number of unemployed rising by 344,000 to 6 million. 

Overall, the US economy added 315,000 jobs in August, which was more than economists had predicted, but still far less than the 526,000 positions added in July – a record month for jobs.

Professional and business services added 68,000 jobs in August, according to the BLS. Within the industry, computer systems design and related services added 14,000 positions; management and technical consulting services grew by 13,000; and scientific research and development services increased by 6,000. Over the past 12 months, professional and business services has added 1.1 million jobs, according to the BLS.

“CIOs and CFOs now are more cautious than they were in the first quarter. CIOs do not have a clear understanding of how a downturn will impact their bottom line,” Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates said in a report last week. “Most still are hiring, but at a slower pace. Some companies have stopped hiring and started laying off employees.”

With all that, the IT job market remains tight, with an average of 200,000 IT professional jobs that are not filled due to a lack of qualified candidates, according to Janulaitis. If there is a major recession, many companies will choose not to fill those new open positions.

“That should be enough of a buffer to keep the hiring of IT pros on a positive track,” he said.

August 2022

Despite a number of sizeable layoffs at high-profile companies in recent months, the tech sector continued to lead all others in low unemployment rates in July, according to a new report from CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

Tech occupations across all industry sectors increased by an estimated 239,000 positions last month, according to an analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data by CompTIA.

Tech industry employment saw a net gain of 12,700 workers, the 20th consecutive month of growth. So far this year, the tech sector has gained 143,700 jobs, an increase of 55% year-over-year, according to CompTIA. The unemployment rate for tech jobs was just 1.7% in July (1.3% for women, 1.8% for men), roughly half the overall US unemployment rate of 3.5%.

Employer job postings for tech positions approached 484,000 in July, a slight decrease from the previous month but still at a near record level. Through the first seven months of 2022, US companies listed approximately 3.1 million jobs postings for tech positions, up 49% compared to 2021.

“The tech jobs market has repeatedly outperformed in the face of real and perceived economic weakness,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “The data confirms that for every layoff announcement there are other employers stepping in to take advantage of tech talent hiring opportunities.”

CompTIA

Meanwhile, since June 2021, more than 4 million people have quit their jobs every month, according to BLS data, part of a trend known as the Great Resignation. The trend  reflects a deep dissatisfaction by many workers with their employment situations. The ongoing global pandemic has enabled workers to rethink their careers, work/life balance, long-term goals, and working conditions.

Some of the top reasons workers quit this year are unhappiness with how their employer treated them during the pandemic (19%), low pay or lack of benefits (17%), and a lack of work-life balance (13%), according to a survey by employment listing website Joblist.

The BLS doesn’t track tech industry jobs directly. Instead, the agency uses the “information sector” as a proxy for tech employment because there are tech jobs in most industries, and therefore technology is not an industry in of itself. 

CompTIA

Within the tech sector, three occupation categories recorded job growth in July – other information services, including search engines (+6,800); data processing, hosting and related services (+4,100); and computer and electronic products manufacturing (+3,300). Hiring in the IT services and custom software development category was flat, while telecom-related occupations declined (-1,400), according to CompTIA.

About one in five tech job postings in July were for positions requiring two years or less of experience. About half specified three to five years of experience, while 13% sought candidates with nine or more years of experience, CompTIA said.

Many employers, even those in tech industries, are ending college degree requirements for many job openings. Instead, organizations are focusing on the skills, experience, and personality traits of job candidates. The sea change opens up tech jobs to a more diverse pool of candidates.

CompTIA

Software developers and engineers are the most in-demand positions employers are looking to fill — accounting for nearly 148,000 job postings last month. There is also a strong job market for IT support specialists, IT project managers, systems engineers and architects, and network engineers and architects. Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills accounted for one-third of all postings in July.

Faced with a dearth of workforce talent, many tech companies and others are hiring through non-traditional approaches that include coding bootcamps, low-code training, and a focus on population areas outside the norm.

July 2022

Over the past three months, IT job openings for entry-level positions have declined significantly, according to a new report.

Job openings for entry-level tech workers declined from 29,500 in April to 24,000 in May and to 18,400 in June, according to IT employment consultancy Janco Associates.

Janco’s report, which was compiled from US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and survey data, said the downward trend is the result of several factors — the most critical of which is an increasing belief among C-level executives that we are already or soon will be in a recession.

In creating its May forecast for future IT hiring, Janco found that almost all 217 CIOs it surveyed are planning on:

• Limiting the extension of existing contracts for contract workers and consultants beyond the 3rd quarter of the year.
• Managing the full-time employee headcount to budgeted levels through the end of this year.
• Not replacing departing employees who do not have critical IT skills and/or enterprise-specific operational knowledge.

“In our interviews, we have found that Wall Street has stopped hiring, and a number of job offers for recent IT college graduates have had offers that were extended pulled back,” Janco’s report stated. “The initial indicators from the monthly BLS data for June seem to be reinforcing those findings.”

Janco’s report noted that some organizations have already started the process of layoffs.

• Netflix, PayPal, Getir, Klarna, Bolt, and Carvana instituted layoffs in May.
• Coinbase will cut 1,100 jobs, about 18% of its global workforce.
• Microsoft is slowing down its hiring “to better align its resources.”
• Meta (Facebook) and Twitter have frozen hiring for some departments.

Gartner research shows that just 4% of US companies have started laying off employees, while 7% have frozen hiring and 15% have started to slow down hiring.

Janco Associates

Hiring is still robust for experienced IT pros —particularly for certain job titles, including security-related positions and in-demand technology, such as blockchain and e-commerce positions — but entry-level candidates are finding it more difficult to find new jobs, according to Janco.

Overall, the number of open jobs in the US at the end of May was 11.3 million, a drop from 11.7 million in April, according to the BLS’s May Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report. Despite the drop in open requisitions, the U.S. added 390,000 jobs in May; The unemployment rate also held at 3.6%, and there were almost two job openings for each unemployed American. The number and rate of workers quitting their jobs remained almost unchanged at 4.3 million and 2.8%, respectively.

The impact of inflation and the potential of a significant downturn is not reflected in the preliminary budgets for 2023. Most CIOs and CFOs are trying to determine what they will do if that downturn occurs, Janco reported.

Janco also publishes a biannual salary survey in January and July. The just-published survey results showed that IT salaries were on the rise in the first six months of 2022. For the first time, median salaries for all IT pros in large enterprises exceeded $100,000.

Midsized companies were offering the greatest salary increases, which averaged north of 4% for IT middle managers and staff. IT executives saw an average 3.04% salary increase this year.

Large enterprises were more miserly, with staff receiving a 3.27% average increase and executives and middle managers earning a 3.47% and 1.20% average boost, respectively.

The unemployment rate for tech occupations fell to a near-record low in May, and employer job postings for tech positions passed 443,000, according to an analysis of the latest labor market data by CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

“The already tight labor market just became even tighter as competition for tech talent reaches near-record levels,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “For any employer relying on the old hiring playbook, it’s time to rethink approaches to recruiting and retention.”

Employers throughout the US economy are stepping up their search for tech workers and tech companies continue to expand payrolls, according CompTIA. Specifically, tech firms added 75,200 workers through the first four months of 2022.

More than 190,000 new IT jobs will be created in 2022, according to IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. The IT job market now has more than 3.85 million positions in the US, with about 130,000 of those positions unfilled, Janco’s report stated.

Some of the top tech jobs in terms of hiring and pay include software developer/engineer, IT project manager, IT support specialist, systems engineer/architect, and network engineer/architect, according to CompTIA’s jobs report.

Tech workers employed in the cloud space saw some of the greatest salary increases over the past year, according to a new salary survey from O’Reilly Media, an online IT training provider. According to the report, cloud-focused workers are the most sought-after tech talent as a growing number of organizations of all sizes utilize cloud tools and services.

The survey revealed that cloud professionals are paid an average yearly salary of $182,000. Report findings also show the impact of the great reshuffle within the tech sector, with 20% reporting they’ve already changed employers over the last year, and 25% of respondents planning to find new employment with better compensation, raising a question of whether the great reshuffle will continue.

Janco Associates

The average salary increase over the past year for cloud workers was 4.3%. The average salary for women, unfortunately, is 7% lower than the average salary for men, the survey also found.

The highest-paid job titles include directors ($235,000) and executives ($231,000), followed by architects, “leads,” and managers ($196,000, $190,000, and $188,000, respectively).

“During the pandemic, we witnessed millions of workers resign from companies in an effort to reconfigure their careers and take deliberate steps toward new job opportunities with higher wages and better alignment between their work and life goals,” said O’Reilly President Laura Baldwin. “With these workers in such demand, we anticipate the great tech exodus to continue unless employers step up with competitive pay, substantial benefits, remote work flexibility, and on-the-job learning and development.”

June 2022

Technology companies added workers for the 18th consecutive month and employer job postings for tech occupations reached a new high in May, according to an analysis of the latest employment data by a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce.

Technology industry level companies added 22,800 net new workers in May. Through the first five months of 2022 employment increased by 106,700 positions and is 69% ahead of the same period versus 2021, according to an analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report by industry association CompTIA.

Employer hiring activity as measured by job postings for tech positions totaled 623,627 for the month of May and nearly 2.2 million year-to-date, which represents a 52% increase versus the same period of the previous year.

“The data speaks to the broad-based nature of the tech workforce,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement. “It also speaks to the many factors affecting employment and situations where sectors or companies easing up on hiring may be offset by sectors or companies increasing hiring.”

The unemployment rate for the IT sector did edge up slightly in May to 2.1% from 2.0% the previous month . The unemployment rate for tech occupations, however, remained remarkably low compared to the overall national unemployment rate of 3.6%.

“In an analysis of the latest BLS data we have found the number of jobs created for IT professionals continues to grow. However, there are some clouds for IT pros’ job prospects six to twelve months in the future.” said M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO of  IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. “The primary driver is inflation and high energy costs which is causing concerns that the economy will slow later in the year and potentially have an extended recession in 2023.”

Janco Associates, which did its own analysis of the BLS jobs report, found over the past year more than 20,000 new IT positions were added each month. That surge has begun to cool a bit with 17,000 new IT jobs created in May. 

Janco Associates

All signs point to that growth continuing but at a slower rate of 13,000 to 14,000 new jobs added per month through out the rest of the year. By the end of 2022, Janco forecasted that 191,000 new IT Jobs will be added.

Currently, there are more than 3.9 million unfilled IT job positions in the US, according to Janco.

“That is driven by the fact that qualified candidates can not be found,” Janulaitis said. “The first sign that the growth of the IT job market is slowing will be the reduction in that number as companies will just pull back on trying to recruit those unfilled positions.”

So far in 2022, the IT job market has grown by 93,400 jobs, which is 43,000 more  than the for the same period in 2021. If there is a downturn, as some predict, one of the reactions by CEOs will be to implement hiring freezes that will result in a decrease in the growth of the IT job market, according to Janulaitis.

CompTIA

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals will continue to be positive but not as broad in scope as last year. CIOs are still posturing to hire more staff and expand technologies to address blockchain processing and security applications based on market conditions,” Janulaitis said. “However recent events, increased energy cost, and the specter of high inflation will harm IT job market growth.”

Positions for software developers and engineers (204,084) accounted for nearly a third of all employer tech job postings in May, an increase of more than 77,000 from April, according to CompTIA. IT project managers, IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects and network engineers and architects also saw market increase in hiring.

One-third of all job postings were for positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills.

Industries that saw some of the hottest hiring trends includeded scientific and technical services, finance and insurance, manufacturing, information, retail trade, health care and social assistance, public administration and educational services. The search for tech talent was widely dispersed across geographies, as well. Four metro areas (New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington) recorded tech jobs postings totals that surpassed 31,000 positions.

Hiring in the IT services and custom software development category led May’s tech sector job growth with more than 13,100 new positions. Hiring in data processing, hosting and related services, computer and electronic products manufacturing and other information services, including search engines also increased. Conversely, jobs in telecommunications declined, according to CompTIA’s report.

April 2022

The IT job market size grew by 17,000 jobs in April, according to new data from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates.

Over the past three months, 43,200 Jobs have been added to IT Job Market, a pace of expansion exceeds 2021, the firm stated in its latest research post.

In 2021, 213,100 jobs were added to the IT Job Market. That not only replaced the jobs lost during the pandemic, but it also expanded the growth to a level that exceeded the pre-pandemic levels. (Janco bases its information on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics — the BLS.) 

“In interviews with both CIOs and HR professionals, Janco has found that hiring IT professionals is at a record high level. This, even with inflation and the specter of a possible economic downturn,” Janco stated. “All signs point to that growth continuing.”

While all IT jobs lost during the pandemic have been recovered, the hiring of IT professionals is now being hindered by a lack of qualified individuals, according to the latest statistics.

The April monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association showed the tech industry added 12,300 jobs from February to March, 2022. Software developers (3,613) and systems engineers/architects (3,126) led the pack in terms of new positions available.

Software developers and engineers are far and away the most sought-after positions companies need to fill, with more than 115,000 job postings across the US, according to CompTIA. IT support specialists, IT project managers, systems engineers and architects, and network engineers and architects are also in high demand.

“By all accounts this was an exceptionally strong start to the year for tech employment,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The arms race in recruiting and retaining tech talent undoubtedly challenges employers in direct and indirect ways.”

The unemployment rate for tech occupations fell to a near-record low, as tech firms added workers for the 16th consecutive month and employer job postings for tech positions surpassed 400,000 in March, according to an analysis of the latest labor market data by CompTIA.

“The already tight labor market just became even tighter as competition for tech talent reaches near-record levels,” Herbert said in a statement. “For any employer relying on the old hiring playbook, it’s time to rethink approaches to recruiting and retention.”

IT jobs across the US increased by 19,000 in March. The unemployment rate for tech occupations is 1.3%, its lowest level since June 2019 and about one-third the current national unemployment rate (3.6%).

Janco is forecasting more than 138,000 new IT jobs will be created in 2022. The IT job market now has more than 3.85 million positions in the US. As of December 2021, Janco reported 3.72 million IT positions in the US.

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals will continue to be positive, but not as broad in scope as in the last quarter of 2021,” Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. “CIOs are still posturing to hire more staff and expand technologies to address blockchain processing and security applications based on market conditions. However recent events, increased energy cost, and the specter of high inflation will harm IT job market growth.”

Janco

IT job growth in recent years.

According to the BLS, employment in computer and information technology occupations is projected to grow 13% from 2020 to 2030, faster than the average for all occupations. IT is projected to add about 667,600 new jobs, with demand for those workers stemming from a greater emphasis on cloud computing, the collection and storage of big data, and information security, according to the BLS.

The median annual wage for computer and information technology occupations was $94,729 in January 2021, which was higher than the median annual wage for all occupations ($45,760). In January 2022, the median wage for IT positions had increased to $96,667 – an uptick of about 2.05%.

Conversely, new IT hires in the last quarter of 2021 were paid 5% to 6% more than existing staff, according to Janco.

“In conversation with several CIOs, we learned that increases for new hires in the 9% to 12% range were not uncommon,” Janulaitis said. “ It is not uncommon for IT pros who are highly skilled and experienced (over 10 years) to be offered salaries at $125,000 and above. Salary disparity is a driver of dissatisfaction and an increase in attrition rate among existing employees.”

December 2021

Hiring of IT professionals is at record pace with 197,000 more IT jobs so far this year than at the same time last year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

There has been growth in the IT job market each of the past eight months, according to IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. 

“Information-Technology leaders say they are boosting compensation packages and flexible work options to widen the pool of prospective job candidates, as demand surges for tech talent,” M. Victor Janulaitis, Janco’s CEO, stated on the company’s website. 

To entice employees and retain existing tech staff, CIOs are offering flexible work options, such as a combination of in-office and remote work. The median salary for IT professionals is expected to grow to between $96,000 and $97,000, up from just over $94,600 in January and $95,600 in June, Janulaitis wrote.

“Most CIOs have not recruited at this rate before. Janco attributes the hiring push of some CIOs to meet their company’s goals to recruit talent related to security, compliance and cloud computing, Those IT jobs are difficult ones to fill,” he said.

In 2019, 90,200 new IT jobs were created. As a result of the global pandemic. By contrast, 33,200 were lost in 2020. In 2021, almost 150,000 jobs were added to the IT job market.

All job markets included, nearly 100 million working-age people were excluded from the labor force in November 2021, according to Janco Associates, which is based on BLS data. Most, of course, are still in school, retired ill or disabled and unable to work, according to the BLS data. But, those excluded from the labor force also include 471,000 “discouraged workers,” which represents an increase from 460,000 last month. Among the reasons cited for not re-joining the workforce were the continued impact of vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and new virus variants.

Roughly 34.4 million people have quit their jobs this year as they reevaluate their work lives, according to job-search company Joblist. A survey of 26,000 employees recently published by Joblist showed nearly three-quarters of respondents said they were actively thinking about quitting. And, roughly 34.4 million people have quit their jobs this year during 2021 as they reevaluate their work lives.

About 46% of the remaining workforce is considering leaving work because they’re not being allowed to work remotely, according to the Work Trend Index study by Microsoft Corp.  

“There are 94.438 million who just do not want work at all. That is a increase of almost 612,000 individuals from the same month last year,” according to Janco Associates’s website.

Baby boomers retiring is another factor in the continued fall in the Labor Participation rate.

Overall, though, the IT job market in the U.S. has added an average of about 13,000 positions during each month of 2021, up from a typical monthly average of between 5,000 and 8,000 jobs.

Job growth in the US IT industry had slowed and took a dip in October, adding just 4,800 positions, according to the BLS data that were included in the figures from Janco Associates. That was down from 8,900 positions added in the revised September figures.

In October, the overall growth in IT positions was even as the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19 continued to hinder overall job growth, mainly due to slowdowns in the restaurant, entertainment, and service sectors.

The IT industry’s bigger challenge is finding qualified candidates for those IT jobs, Janulaitis said in a statement at the time. And the challenge won’t end soon, he said:

From data that we have reviewed, shutdowns resulted in fewer computer science candidates graduating from universities and trade schools. Those in the pipeline for those degrees were reduced as well. One of the drivers of that trend was that the closing of borders limited the number of foreign nationals who could qualify for that training and education.

Many of the new positions that CIOs are trying to fill are in new technologies. There is a shortfall of individuals who have the training and skills necessary. There are open positions that cannot be filled. … At the same, time attrition rates are on the rise in many IT organizations.

US IT job growth was stronger earlier in the year, before the delta variant and the talent shortage: August saw a surge of 25,400 new jobs on the heels of about 18,500 in June and 9,900 in July (all are revised figures), reflecting continuing business recovery from the pandemic. In fact, IT job growth has occurred for 15 consecutive months, though it was uneven through May. I has averaged 13,000 new jobs each month so far in 2021.

The IT job situation in the US continues to look very much like the pre-pandemic state: more positions than candidates. In fact, businesses would have filled more IT positions in September had they found enough qualified candidates, Janulaitis said. Finding web developers and cybersecurity and compliance pros remains the toughest task for CIOs, he said — and is causing HR to focus more on IT staff retention.

That talent shortage has put even greater pressure on businesses to increase salaries, Janulaitis said — and US IT salaries had already been trending up in 2021.

Janco still expects 2021 to have greater IT job growth — there were 189,000 new positions in 2021 as of Oct. 31, with two more months of hiring left in the year — than in any previous year, more than making up for jobs lost due to the pandemic. The last high was 2015, when 112,500 new positions were created. In 2018, 104,600 new IT positions were added; in 2019, the increase was 90,200; and in 2020, the industry lost 33,200 positions.

There are now 3.72 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association also showed slower hiring growth in October. CompTIA calculated that there were 8,300 new US tech-sector jobs last month, down from September’s 18,700, August’s 26,800, July’s 10,700, and June’s 10,500 jobs. The US tech sector’s job numbers remain above their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions, nudging just past 4.81 million in October 2021, according to CompTIA data.

CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical; Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

CompTIA calculated the estimated unemployment rate for the tech sector at 2.1% in October, down from 2.2% in September but up from 1.5% in August and July. The current tech unemployment rate is within range of its 2018-19 lows, where it ranged from 1.2% to 2.4%. The national unemployment rate in October was 4.6%, down from 4.8% in September, according to the BLS.

October 2021

The job growth in the US IT industry slowed in September, adding 16,700 positions, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data reported in the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. That’s down from 22,000 positions added in the revised August figures.

Overall growth in IT positions comes even as the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19 continued to hinder overall job growth, mainly due to slowdowns in the restaurant, entertainment, and service sectors.

That August surge followed job growth of about 18,500 in June and 10,100 in July (both are revised figures), reflecting continuing business recovery from the pandemic in the US. In fact, IT job growth has occurred every month this year, though it was uneven through May, averaging 13,000 new jobs each month so far in 2021.

The IT job situation in the US continues to look very much like the pre-pandemic state: more positions than candidates. In fact, businesses would have filled more IT positions in September had they found enough qualified candidates for them, Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. Finding web developers and cybersecurity and compliance pros remains the toughest task for CIOs, he said — and is causing HR to focus more on IT staff retention.

That talent shortage has put even greater pressure on businesses to increase salaries, Janulaitis said — and US IT salaries had already been trending up in 2021.

Janco expects 2021 to have greater IT job growth — 145,000 to 152,000 new positions — than in any year since 2015, when 112,500 new positions were created. In 2018, 104,600 new IT positions were added; in 2019, the increase was 90,200; and in 2020, the industry lost 33,200 positions.

There are now 3.72 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association also showed slower growth in September hiring. CompTIA calculated that there were 18,700 new US tech-sector jobs last month, down from August’s 26,800, but still a jump over both July’s gain of 10,700 and June’s gain of 10,500 jobs. The US tech sector’s job numbers remain above their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions, reaching 4.81 million in September 2021, according to CompTIA data.

CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

CompTIA calculated the estimated unemployment rate for the tech sector at 2.2% in September, up from 1.5% in August and July, and the same as in June. The current tech unemployment rate is within range of its 2018-19 lows, where it ranged from 1.2% to 2.4%. The national unemployment rate in September was 4.8%, according to the BLS.

September 2021

The job growth in the US IT industry accelerated in August, adding 25,400 positions, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data reported in the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. That growth in IT positions comes even as the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19 slowed overall job growth, mainly due to slowdowns in the restaurant and entertainment sectors.

The August surge follows job growth of about 18,500 in June and 10,100 in July (both are revised figures), reflecting continuing business recovery from the pandemic in the US. In fact, IT job growth has occurred every month this year, though it was uneven through May.

The IT job situation in the US continues to look very much like the pre-pandemic state: more positions than candidates. In fact, businesses would have filled more IT positions in August had they found enough qualified candidates for them, Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. Finding web developers and cybersecurity and compliance pros remains the toughest task for CIOs, he said — and is causing HR to focus more on IT staff retention.

That talent shortage has put even greater pressure on businesses to increase salaries, Janulaitis said — and US IT salaries had already been trending up in 2021.

Janco expects 2021 to have greater IT job growth — 132,000 to 152,000 new positions — than in any year since 2015, when 112,500 new positions were created. In 2018, 104,600 new IT positions were added; in 2019, the increase was 90,200; and in 2020, the industry lost 33,200 positions.

There are now 3.7 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association also showed a surge in August hiring. CompTIA calculated that there were 26,800 new US tech-sector jobs last month, a jump over both July’s gain of 10,700 and June’s gain of 10,500 jobs. The US tech sector’s job numbers have now exceeded their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions, reaching 4.79 million in August 2021, according to CompTIA data.

CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

CompTIA calculated the estimated unemployment rate for the tech sector at 1.5% in August, the same as in July and down from 2.2% in June. The current tech unemployment rate is approaching its 2018-19 lows, where it ranged from 1.2% to 2.4%. The national unemployment rate in August was 5.2%, according to the BLS.

August 2021

The job growth in the US IT industry continued at a steady pace in July, adding 11,200 positions, according to figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. June saw an increase of 11,400, reflecting continuing business recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In fact, IT job growth has occurred every month this year, though it was uneven in the first five months of the year.

Today, the jobs situation looks very much like the pre-pandemic state: more positions than candidates. “With reopening, more organizations are actively recruiting,” Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. “In full-employment states, there are many positions for IT pros that remain unfilled due to the lack of qualified candidates.”

That’s put pressure on businesses to increase salaries.

Janco expects 2021 to have greater IT job growth — 108,000 new positions — than in any year since 2015, when 112,500 new positions were created. The year 2018 saw 104,600 new IT positions; 2019 saw 90,200; and 2020 saw a loss of 33,200 positions.

There are nearly 3.7 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association calculated that there were 10,700 new US tech sector jobs in July, similar to June’s gain of 10,500 jobs and following gains the entire year. The US tech sector’s job numbers have now essentially matched their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions, according to the CompTIA data.

CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

CompTIA calculated the estimated unemployment rate for the tech sector as 1.5% in July, down from 2.2% in June. The current tech unemployment rate is approaching its 2018-19 lows, where it ranged from 1.2% to 2.4%. The national unemployment rate in July was 5.4%, according to the BLS.

July 2021

The US IT industry has seen strong job growth so far in 2021, according to revised figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as reported in the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates.

The BLS has adjusted its figures on job growth for all of 2021, bringing the total hires to 69,000 IT staffers through June. The agency had previously reported 47,700 jobs through May, a figure now revised upward to 57,100. June saw an additional 11,900 hires, and it’s possible the BLS could revise its figures again in future reports.

Janco also confirmed previously reported preliminary data on US IT salaries from its own surveys. As the jobs market remains steady in its post-COVID recovery, IT salaries have started to increase as organizations struggle to fill some positions.

That salary survey shows that IT execs in large enterprises are getting the largest salary boosts, with a median increase of 3.2%. Those in midsize enterprises are seeing median rises of 1.2%. For lower-level positions, IT pros do better at midsize enterprises than at large ones: Middle managers at large enterprises are seeing 0.6% boosts, while those at medium-sized firms are seeing 1.3% increases.

IT staffers are seeing the least improvement — an ongoing phenomemon across all company sizes, in which IT execs continue to be rewarded more. Staffers at large enterprises are realizing 0.4% gains; those at midsize enterprises are seeing 0.7% gains. 

At its worst, more than 100,000 IT jobs were lost during the depths of the pandemic in spring 2020, though two-thirds of those came back as the year progressed. Still, 2020 ended with 33,200 fewer IT jobs in the US compared to 2019. With the 69,000 estimated job gains so far in 2021, the US IT job market at the end of June is at 16,700 ahead of the 2020 peak in February — and nearly 140,000 jobs ahead of the 2020 nadir in July.

There are more than 3.6 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association calculated that there were 10,500 new US tech sector jobs in June, following gains in each previous month of 2021. The US tech sector’s job numbers have now essentially matched their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions, according to the CompTIA data.

CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

CompTIA’s data does show a softening of hiring, with small reductions in job postings in several roles, such as for software developers and systems analysts, as well as in several cities, including Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and San Francisco. By contrast, postings grew for positions in San Jose, Calif. The data show more variability, indicating perhaps some settling of hiring activities.

CompTIA calculated the estimated unemployment rate for the tech sector as 2.2% in June, down from 2.4% in May. The current tech unemployment rate is approaching its 2018-19 lows, where it ranged from 1.2% to 2.4%.

June 2021

As the US IT jobs market remains steady in its post-COVID recovery, salaries have started to increase as organizations struggle to fill some positions. That’s based on a survey to be releasd June 15 by IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. Janco provided Computerworld a preview of that survey.

That salary survey shows that IT executives in large enterprises are getting the largest salary boosts, with a median rise of 3.2%. IT execs in midsize enterprises are seeing median rises of 1.2%. For lower-level positions, IT pros do better at midsize enterprises than at large ones: Middle managers at large enterprises are seeing 0.6% boosts, while those at midsize enterprises are seeing 1.3% rises.

IT staffers are seeing the least improvement — an ongoing phenomemon across all company sizes, in which IT execs continue to be rewarded more — with those at large enterprises registering 0.4% gains and those at midsize enterprises seeing 0.7% gains. 

The US IT employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been very volatile in 2021, with the agency reducing its prior-month estimates several times this year. The agency, for example, reduced its 2021 job gain count by 14,100 from earlier estimates. The BLS data shows a May rise in IT hires of 7,700, and — even with the downward BLS revisions for prior months — the net growth for US IT jobs this year stands at about 47,700, according to Janco’s analysis.

At its worst, more than 100,000 IT jobs were lost during the depths of the pandemic in spring 2020, though two-thirds of those came back as the year progressed. Still, 2020 ended with 33,200 fewer IT jobs in the US compared to 2019. With the 47,700 estimated job gains so far in 2021, the US IT job market at the end of May is at 13,500 more than the 2020 peak in February — and nearly 150,000 ahead of the 2020 nadir in July.

There are more than 3.6 million IT pro jobs in the US, Janco estimates.

The monthly tech jobs report released by the CompTIA industry association calculated that there were 10,500 new US tech sector jobs in May, following gains in each previous month of 2021. CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, with roughly 44% being technical and 56% being nontechnical, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

Still, the US tech sector’s job numbers have not yet matched their March 2020 peak of 4.76 million positions. As of last month, there were 4.74 million, a number that continues to grow.

CompTIA’s unemploment rate estimate for the tech sector stood at 2.4% in May, within its range over the last few months — versus 5.8% in May for the national rate for all industries. For previous months, CompTIA calculated a 2.5% tech unemployment rate in April, 1.9% in March, and 2.4% in February. The rise in the overall tech unemployment rate may reflect a loss of sales jobs in the tech sector, even as technologist jobs grew.

CompTIA also saw the number of tech-related job listings jump in May, to about 365,000 versus the 307,000 estimated for April. Job postings have grown by about 158,000 so far in 2021.

Software developers constituted the largest pool of listed openings at 112,200, with listings for IT support specialists coming in second at 28,200 and for system engineers and architects third at 27,200 — all represent significant increases from May.

The top sector for tech job postings in May was manufacturing, which had 70,970 positions open. Professional and technical services followed at 58,783, then finance and insurance at 31,054, and information services at 20,244.

The Washington, D.C. metro area had the most job postings, 21,611, followed by the New York metro area with 20,481; the Dallas metro area with 14,796; the Los Angeles metro area at 12,825; and the Atlanta metro area at 12,825. The San Francisco metro came in sixth at 11,918, just 117 more postings than in April. And the adjacent San Jose metro came in ninth at 8,746.

The Chicago metro had the greatest decline in postings, with 10,526 postings — down 1,025 from April. On the West Coast, slight declines in job postings were recorded in the Los Angeles area (205 fewer), the Seattle area (51 fewer, for 80,080 in May), and the San Jose metro area (466 fewer, wiping out the 117 gain in the adjacent San Francisco metro).

May 2021

Nearly all the US IT jobs lost in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic have come back, with IT employment enjoying eight straight months of growth. Of course, some of the replacement jobs were in IT specialties other than the jobs lost, as there has been a steady trend of declining data center and telecommunications positions in favor of software development jobs; that was true, even before the pandemic.

At its worst, more than 100,000 IT jobs were lost during the depths of the pandemic in spring 2020, though two-thirds of those came back as the year progressed. Still, 2020 ended with 33,200 fewer IT jobs in the US compared to 2019.

So far in 2021, 30,400 IT jobs have been added, nearly erasing the 2020 net losses.

And IT jobs in 2021 are set to continue to grow, according to the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. It expects another 70,000 IT jobs to be available this year. Janco’s numbers come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly reports.

When adjusted for seasonality, March saw 6,500 new IT jobs, February saw 9,400, and January saw 14,400. The January and February numbers were revised up significantly from BLS’s original estimate of 8,500 and 6,000, respectively.

The Janco figures jibe with a report released by the CompTIA industry association. It calculated that there were 9,700 new US tech sector jobs in March, following a gain of 7,700 in February and 19,500 in January. CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

Using a much broader definition of IT, including sales positions, CompTIA estimated that 50,000 IT-related jobs were added in March across all industries, following a 178,000-job gain in in February and a 78,000-job gain in January. That reflects an unemployment rate of 1.9%, down from 2.4% in February 2021 and the lowest rate since August 2019.

Nationally, for all jobs, the US unemployment rate fell from 6.2% in February to 6.1% in March, according to the BLS. But the national unemployment rate is closer to 9% if those who have given up looking are included, estimates Oxford Economics; the BLS reports the level of these discouraged workers has remained steady.

CompTIA also saw the number of IT-related job listings grow by about 30,000 in March, passing 307,000. That follows a rise of 44,300 listings in February and 26,000 in January.

Software developers constituted the largest pool of listed openings at 93,000, with listings for IT support specialists coming in second at 25,800 and for system engineeris and architects third at 23,200.

April 2021

Nearly all the US IT jobs lost in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic have come back, with IT employment enjoying eight straight months of growth. Of course, some of the replacement jobs were in IT specialties other than the jobs lost, as there has been a steady trend of declining data center and telecommunications positions in favor of software development jobs; that was true, even before the pandemic.

At its worst, more than 100,000 IT jobs were lost during the depths of the pandemic in spring 2020, though two-thirds of those came back as the year progressed. Still, 2020 ended with 33,200 fewer IT jobs in the US compared to 2019.

So far in 2021, 30,400 IT jobs have been added, nearly erasing the 2020 net losses.

And IT jobs in 2021 are set to continue to grow, according to the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. It expects another 70,000 IT jobs to be available this year. Janco’s numbers come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly reports.

When adjusted for seasonality, March saw 6,500 new IT jobs, February saw 9,400, and January saw 14,400. The January and February numbers were revised up significantly from BLS’s original estimate of 8,500 and 6,000, respectively.

The Janco figures jibe with a report released by the CompTIA industry association. It calculated that there were 9,700 new US tech sector jobs in March, following a gain of 7,700 in February and 19,500 in January. CompTIA calculates both technical and nontechnical positions at tech vendors, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

Using a much broader definition of IT, including sales positions, CompTIA estimated that 50,000 IT-related jobs were added in March across all industries, following a 178,000-job gain in in February and a 78,000-job gain in January. That reflects an unemployment rate of 1.9%, down from 2.4% in February 2021 and the lowest rate since August 2019.

Nationally, for all jobs, the US unemployment rate fell from 6.2% in February to 6.1% in March, according to the BLS. But the national unemployment rate is closer to 9% if those who have given up looking are included, estimates Oxford Economics; the BLS reports the level of these discouraged workers has remained steady.

CompTIA also saw the number of IT-related job listings grow by about 30,000 in March, passing 307,000. That follows a rise of 44,300 listings in February and 26,000 in January.

Software developers constituted the largest pool of listed openings at 93,000, with listings for IT support specialists coming in second at 25,800 and for system engineeris and architects third at 23,200.

March 2021

As the overall US economy showed continued glimpses of recovery in February, the IT job market continued the rebound that began in the fall, though at a slower pace than in January.

Growth last month was 13,700, according to the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. January saw 8,600 new IT jobs. When adjusted for seasonality, February saw 6,000 new IT jobs, and January saw 10,900, down dramatically from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) original estimate of 18,200.

Still, the overall trend for IT — whose US jobs number 3.6 million — remains on an upward trajectory.

The Janco figures jibe with a report released by the CompTIA industry association. It calculated that there were 7,700 new US tech sector jobs in February, following a gain of 19,500 in January. CompTIA calculates both technical and  nontechnical positions at tech vendors, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

Using a much broader definition of IT, including sales positions, CompTIA estimated that 178,000 IT-related jobs were added in February across all industries, following a 78,000-job gain in January. That reflects an unemployment rate of 2.4%, down from 3.0% in December 2020.

Nationally, for all jobs, the US unemployment rate fell from an adjusted 6.3% in January to 6.2% in February, according to the BLS. But the national unemployment rate is closer to 9% if those who have given up looking are included, estimates Oxford Economics; the BLS reports the level of these discouraged workers has remained steady.

CompTIA also saw the number of IT-related job listings grow by about 44,300 in February, passing 277,000. That follows a rise of 26,000 listings in January. Software developers constituted the largest pool of listed openings at 88,000, with listings for systems engineers and architects coming in second at 22,700. But Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis expects that over the next several years, coders will find jobs scarcer as low-code development gains traction, even as demand for software developers overall increases.

February 2021

Even as the overall US economy struggled in January — adding just 6,000 private sector jobs and 49,000 jobs overall — the seasonally adjusted IT job growth last month was 18,200, according to the latest figures from IT employment consultancy Janco Associates. The past two months saw 55,000 new IT jobs, revised up from the 18,000 total reported a month earlier, based on revisions from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still, compared to January 2020, US IT jobs have decreased by 35,800, a loss of about 1%. Last spring, more than 100,000 IT jobs were lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic, representing about 3% of the IT workforce.

The Janco figures jibe with a report released by the CompTIA industry association. It calculated that there were 19,500 new US tech sector jobs in January. CompTIA calculates both technical and  nontechnical positions at tech vendors, whereas Janco looks at IT positions, including software developers, in all industries.

Using a much broader definition of IT, including sales positions, CompTIA estimated that 78,000 IT-related jobs were added in January across all industry sectors. That reflects an unemployment rate of 2.4%, down from 3.0% in December 2020. Nationally, for all jobs, the US unemployment rate fell to 6.3% from 6.7%. But the national unemployment rate is closer to 9% if those who have given up looking are included, estimates Oxford Economics.

CompTIA also saw the number of IT-related job listings grow by about 26,000 in January, passing 232,000.

Over the coming decade, Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis expects 11% growth in US IT jobs. “Most of the growth in the IT job market will be with software developers, quality assurance, and testers,” he said in a statement. “This will be driven by [work from home] as it is will be embraced by more enterprises in normal operations and internet-centric applications are developed and deployed.

“The projected growth for that sector alone will be almost 18%,” he said.

January 2021

For the first time since the dot-com bust of 2000-2002, US IT salaries were flat in 2020, rising a negligible 0.08% to an average of $94,609 per year, according to the most recent survey of IT executives by management consultancy Janco Associates. The year also ended with 55,900 fewer jobs than the US IT industry had on Jan. 1, 2020 — a drop of 1.5% for the year. (Last week, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] revised its figures for 2020, resulting in a revised drop of 55,900 versus the 81,100 reported previously.)

A separate survey by the industry association CompTIA, using BLS data, showed that the broad US tech industry showed job growth of 391,000 positions (22,000 of which were at tech vendors) in December 2020 — even as the US as a whole lost 140,000 jobs. About 44% of those tech sector jobs are for positions such as IT staff, software developers, and IT project managers; the rest are support positions such as sales, marketing, and management.

Janco’s survey focuses specifically on IT jobs, mainly people in a CIO’s organization, whereas the CompTIA survey looks at the entire tech sector.

The December growth in tech and IT jobs still left the broader tech sector below December 2019’s level, with 4.68 million jobs in December 2020, down from 4.73 million a year earlier. CompTIA’s survey shows a steady increase in tech jobs since July 2020, after a steep drop that began in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Janco survey showed that IT middle managers lost the most pay ground in 2020, with an average 0.08% salary reduction at large enterprises and 0.07% reduction at mid-sized enterprises. IT staff saw 0.03% average salary increases in large enterprises and 0.04% in medium enterprises. Executives did the best, of course: their salaries were up 0.59% in large enterprises and up 0.35% in medium ones.

April and May were the worst months for US IT jobs in 2020, Janco’s data shows. In those months, 116,000 IT pros lost their jobs due to COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. Hiring partially recovered in later months, but the total of 3.58 million US IT jobs in 2020 remained below 2019’s 3.64 million (but slightly above 2018’s 3.54 million).

Janco notes that IT consulting and contract positions meant to augment IT staff were all but eliminated in 2020 and hiring growth stalled in the second wave of lockdowns that began in the fall as COVID-19 infections resurged. Those infection rates continue to grow in early 2021; Janco’s interviews with 101 US CIOs reveal that they don’t expect IT job or salary growth in 2021.

Still, IT was fortunate in 2020 compared to many other industries. The COVID-19 pandemic devastated many industries, eliminating jobs at an unprecedented scale in the travel, hospitality, entertainment, and events businesses. Retailers with physical stores faced massive job losses as well, though manufacturing has largely bounced back. The US overall had 9.4% fewer jobs as of June 30 (the latest data available) compared to 2019, the BLS reported. The tech unemployment rate has been roghly half that of the national rate throughout the pandemic, ending at 3% in December 2020 versus 6.7% for the economy as a whole, CompTIA reported.

Despite those massive losses in multiple industries, the average US salary rose 2.6% in 2020, according to the PayScale salary survey, which was last updated on Oct. 12. The latest data from the BLS, which covers the first half of 2020, showed an 8.6% average salary increase from a year earlier. Some of the salary increases reflect higher pay for grocery workers, delivery drivers, and warehouse workers whose jobs became more critical during the lockdowns and who were at greater risk of contracting the virus in their work.

Of course, people who lost their jobs aren’t included in salary surveys, so those figures reflect the pay of the still-employed.

CompTIA reports that software developers had the largest employment gains (4,700 hires) in December, triple that of the next-largest group, systems analysts (1,400 hires).

December 2020

After three months of rebound, the US IT job market reversed course in November, shedding 8,300 jobs. That loss follows a 9,300-job gain in October, a 13,500 gain in September, and a 4,500 gain in August. For the year, the net loss of US IT jobs now stands at 81,100, still down from a peak high of 102,900 job losses this year as of August, according to the most recent survey of IT executives by management consultancy Janco Associates. 

In November, “the major loss of jobs for IT professions was in [small businesses] and consulting firms that service them; 7.5 million small to mid-size business are disproportionately impacted by shutdowns,” said Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis. He said many of these closures escape notice because they shut down before their debt levels require going through bankruptcy court.

Large companies have also shuttered or retrenched, he said.

Three quarters of the lost IT jobs in the US are concentrated in two segments, he said. One is data processing, hosting, and related services, the other is computer systems design and related services.

“Hiring of IT professionals has all but stopped due to the uncertainty about the recovery,” Janulaitis said. And the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic this fall, and the likelihood that vaccinations will be largely complete only in summer 2021, suggests that IT jobs will be at risk for the foreseeable future, he said, as many businesses continue to shrink and many others put off anchoring until there’s more economic certainty.

November 2020

IT jobs lost at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns continue to recover slowly, with an additional 12,700 US jobs added in October — bringing the total recovered jobs since August to 27,800. Those autumn gains bring the loss of US IT jobs to 75,100 for the year, down from a high of 102,900 job losses as of August, according to the most recent survey of IT executives by management consultancy Janco Associates.

The IT job market continues to struggle with the closure of many small- and medium-sized businesses and of many retail operations, in addition to broad cutbacks in all industries meant to preserve cash, said Janco CEO M. Victor Janulaitis.

In addition, the percentage of data center jobs has dropped from 10% of the US IT workforce to 9% since the pandemic began, indicating more severe cutbacks in back-end IT services as part of a shift to the cloud.

A separate report by Foote Partners, which conducts salary surveys on IT jobs and certifications, shows a mixed bag for IT pros in 2020, with some skills increasing in compensation despite (or because of) the pandemic, and others losing value. On average, though, IT compensation has held steady.

Gainers include a variety of positions involving security, Apache ZooKeeper distributed configuration, the Hbase SQL database, the Ethereum blockchain, Oracle Coherence caching, Marketo marketing automation, the Apache Flink stream-processing framework, natural language processing, master data management, and the Keras deep learning API.

Decliners include BusinessObjects and Cognos application development, Google App Engine and JSON web development, Oracle Application Server, SAP Enterprise Business Applications, SNA networking, mobile device management, Cisco’s UCCX call center platform, big data analytics, Windows NT, Suse Linux, and Tibco Enterprise Messaging Service.

October 2020

Although the  IT and telecommunications job market in the US is still expected to shrink by 64,000 jobs this year compared to 2019, the recovery of IT jobs lost during the early days of the pandemic continued for a second month. The most recent survey of IT executives by management consultancy Janco Associates shows that about 12,200 IT jobs were added in September following a net gain of 6,900 in August. 

At the outset of the pandemic, more than 105,000 US IT jobs were lost as companies retrenched in the face of COVID-19, more than erasing the 90,200 jobs added in all of 2019. Those losses have been partially addressed since through rehiring and new hires. As a result, over the last nine months, IT jobs were down by 85,000.

However, Janco doesn’t forecast a recovery in the IT job marked until spring 2021, as the US economy suffers new waves of infections that slow or even reverse prior gains. In October, an additional wave of IT layoffs is expected as airlines furlough tens of thousands of workers now that federal job subsidies have ended for that industry.

Companies are leery about expanding during uncertainties around government action, particularly the stalled stimulus efforts, said Janco president Victor Janulaitis. The November presidential election is another cause for companies to wait and see. “Spending for IT products and services has all but stopped as companies reevaluate the state of the economy globally as new waves of selected shutdowns occur,” he said.

September 2020

By Ken Mingis, Executive Editor, Computerworld

Although the U.S. IT and telecommunications job market is still expected to shrink by 64,000 jobs in 2020 versus 2019, the worst may be over – and about a third of the IT jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to have come back by 2021. That’s according to the most recent survey of IT executives by management consultancy Janco Associates.

For the first time in six months, August saw a net gain in the number of IT jobs: up 6,900. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised the number of IT jobs lost in July, showing 4,400 fewer jobs were lost than originally reported. Still, over the last 12 months, IT jobs fell by 81,800, nearly erasing the 90,200 jobs gained in 2019.

“IT hiring will remain soft but improving slightly. …Major many companies are resuming existing operations slowly, but are holding back on any expansion until after the [Nov. 3] election,” said Janco’s latest report.

But some sectors will continue to lose jobs, it noted, including the airline industry, which is poised to lay off tens of thousands of employees across all roles, not just IT, as federal COVID-related subsidies end on Sept. 30. Cities such as Portland, Ore. that have seen ongoing civil unrest due to protests over police killings of Black citizens will also see deferred hiring until the unrest subsides, Janco said.

IT organizations remain cautious on spending, with very few new initiatives or expansions of current efforts being funded beyond the initial rampup in work-from-home and social-distancing technology investments at the start of the crisis.

August 2020

Coronavirus spikes in parts of the U.S. in July have worsened hiring conditions for IT professionals, and management consulting firm Janco Associates now doesn’t expect any rebound in hiring until late this year or early in 2021.

Janco now estimates that just 25,000 new IT jobs will be created in 2020; there are now more than 163,000 fewer tech jobs than a year ago. In July alone, another 10,900 IT positions disappeared, the company said.

“We have found that a number of companies have already shuttered their doors or are expanding layoffs that impact the IT job market,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said in a statement. “This includes oil and gas drillers like Whiting Petroleum and Diamond Offshore, retailers like J Crew, manufacturers like Briggs & Stratton, and grocers like Dean and DeLuca. As a result, IT professionals working for those companies are looking for new employment opportunities.

“Until after the election…, when the public feels [it] can go back to a normal life [and]  more companies open their doors, hiring for new positions in IT will be limited at best,” he said. “In addition, the continued civil unrest is slowing confidence by the public, which in turn, hinders corporate confidence.”

He noted the stalemate in Washington, D.C. over new efforts to prop up the U.S. economy, as several states deal with increasing numbers of COVID-19 cases.

“Spending for IT products and services has all but stopped as companies reevaluate the state of the economy globally as new waves of selected shutdowns occur,” Janulaitis said. “With more companies adopting [work from home] to address ‘social distancing’ and avoid in-office contacts, fewer companies are taking an aggressive approach to any additional spending for IT products and services. It does not help that the U.S. Congress and the president are at a stalemate on pandemic relief.”

July 2020

The wave of IT layoffs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic did not end in May 2020 as expected, with June seeing 6,000 more layoffs as business uncertainties rose because of the increase in coronavirus infections in the U.S., according to new data from management consulting firm Janco Associates. The pandemic’s economic fallout had already led to about 117,000 job losses in U.S. IT positions in April and early May 2020.

The increase in COVID-19 infections across most U.S. states in June prompted the additional layoffs, and Janco’s June survey of U.S. IT organizations shows that further layoffs – though at the relatively small scale seen in June – are expected given business uncertainties. That survey also said that salary increases for IT staffers are “a thing of the past.”

The job losses were exacerbated by the extensive protests over the police killings of George Floyd and others, Janco said. That led to additional economic uncertainty, particularly in the retail industry hit by looting, leading to additional closings, deferred reopenings, and unexpected costs.

In addition, a Trump Administration decision last month to pause the use of H-1B visas, which are commonly used to fill IT positions, will not help U.S. IT pros in the near term, Janco noted. Because it applies to new hires it does little to free up existing positions.

IT organizations don’t expect to begin hiring again until late 2020 or early 2021, assuming that the infections are under control and the economic reopening interrupted in June can resume. Without a sustained reopening, companies won’t see demand for goods and services that provides the money for new and replacement hires.

Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis now expects the net number of new U.S. IT jobs in 2020 will be about 30,000, versus the 94,500 it had expected before the epidemic struck. In 2019, the U.S. IT job market grew by 90,200.

June 2020

The wave of IT layoffs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has ended, according to new data from management consulting firm Janco Associates. The pandemic’s economic fallout resulted in about 117,000 job losses in U.S. IT positions in April and early May 2020.

But Janco’s May survey of U.S. IT organizations shows that further layoffs are largely not expected. But neither is much IT job growth. IT organizations don’t expect to begin hiring again until late 2020, assuming that the gradual economic reopening now in progress continues and demand for goods and services resumes, providing the money for new and replacement hires.

Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis expects that the net number of new U.S. IT jobs in 2020 will be about 35,000, versus the 94,500 it had expected before the epidemic struck. In 2019, the U.S. IT job market grew by 90,200.

May 2020

It’s not yet at the level of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” for IT workers, as it is for many workers in retail, entertainment, and hospitality. But as it becomes apparent the road to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will be take several years, IT pros are seeing layoffs in the U.S. and diminished prospects for future work, both as staff and as contractors.

In April 2020, IT pros saw 102,300 layoffs in the U.S., according to management consulting firm Janco Associates. And Janco has now more than halved the expected IT job growth in 2020 that it predicted just a month ago – to 40,000 versus the earlier prediction of 95,400 IT jobs.

Janco’s current projection for U.S. IT jobs this year is now 3.6 million, down from 2019’s 3.7 million U.S. IT jobs.

Companies have essentially stopped filling IT positions and halted new contract work, Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said, based on conversations with CIOs and CFOs. That means IT pros who lose their jobs will have little prospect of employment or contract work in 2020.

“Until the public begins to feel they can go back to a normal lifestyle and companies open their doors, IT hiring will be nonexistent,” he said.

Janulaitis noted that there had been a surge in IT contract work at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis to help set up work-at-home environments, from collabration tools to VPNs. “The demand for contractor help in this effort was high initially, but now is non-existent,” Janulaitis said. The tech startup sector is also in crisis.

Janulaitis does expect IT hiring to begin picking up at the end of the year. That’s in line with the current thinking for the economy as a whole; various U.S. Federal Reserve executives and economists have said they expect the current effective jobless rate of about 23% to fall back but still be about 10% in 2021. The official jobless rate stands at 14.7% – versus 3.5% in 2019 – but that count misses recent layoffs, laid-off people not looking for work during the crisis, and the self-employed.

Broadly, expectations of a V-shaped recovery have given way to expectations of a prolonged decline and then slow recovery, since there is no vaccine for COVID-19, treatments and testing are not available at meaningful levels to determine who can work safely, it’s not known whether infected people develop immunity, and the ramifications of the various efforts now under way to reopen parts of society and economy remains unknown.

The fate of IT positions is not immune from these general economic factors. “All of this has put IT professionals the same state as the rest of the labor market,”Janulaitis said.

5G, Careers, Financial Services Industry, Industry, IT Jobs, Remote Work, Salaries

The recent security issue with xz-utils has delayed the latest Ubuntu beta release and other major Linux distros. The delay follows the discovery of a critical vulnerability, CVE-2024-3094 , which has prompted developers to push back the release by a week to ensure the safety of the upcoming Ubuntu version, codenamed Noble Numbat.

It is thought that Android users will soon gain access to Apple’s Find My network, enabling users on both Apple and Android platforms to find lost and stolen devices and protect against unwanted stalkers.

Apple’s three-year old Find My network isn’t perfect, but it does make it easier for people to track devices, family members, and certain items equipped with Find My support.

There are some problems. It can fail if a device isn’t detectible; law enforcement doesn’t always act when told the location of a stolen device; and stalkers have been known to use these devices to track people who don’t want to be tracked. That last concern should be improved once it is supported by Apple and on Android.

What did Apple and Google promise?

Apple and Google announced plans to work together to deal with unwanted stalkers using tracking services almost a year ago, and agreed to team up on the Find My network.  They promised to develop a draft standard to prevent Bluetooth location-tracking devices from being used without authorization and a draft specification was filed with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with support from other manufacturers, including Samsung and Tile.

What this means

There are two pillars to this news:

• People attempting to track others without permission using AirTags or other compatibled evices will find it harder to do so, as victims will be warned that tracking is taking place. There have been complaints about this kind of activity since Apple introduced AirTags.
• It also means Android users will be able to track their devices using the Find My network, which will now be able to gather signals from both Android and Apple devices. This should benefit users on both platforms since it means the Find My network itself will grow. At present, it relies only on Apple devices.

How this works

“With the new Find My Device network, you’ll be able to locate your devices even if they’re offline,” an email from the company states. That email also explains how the system can be used to track lots of different compatible devices, and how it works. Android users can opt out of the tracking system if they wish.

Piecing together online reports, the system works like this: If you’re using a compatible device and it detects you are being tracked, you will receive a notification warning you. You’ll also be able to disable the tracker from your device. iPhone users will get this message: “This item isn’t certified on the Apple Find My network. You can disable this item and stop it from sharing its location with the owner. To do this, follow the instructions provided on a website by the manufacturer of this item.”

What Google said about Find My

“With the new Find My Device network, you’ll be able to locate your devices even if they’re offline,” an email from Google explains. That email also explains how the system can be used to track lots of different compatible devices, and how it works. Android users can opt out of the tracking system if they wish.

What isn’t yet clear is whether this support will extend across all Android devices or across all devices from all manufacturers, though it seems likely it will be supported by current devices running current iterations of the OS. The feature has been spotted in the wild by Android users running Google Play Services beta 24.12.14.

What happens next?

With almost a year’s work now done, it appears Find My is finally ready for cross platform take-off, with Google contacting some Android users to tell them the network will launch in “days.”

The long wait between last year’s announcement of the system and it becoming a shipping product reflects the deliberate nature of the standard specification process. News of the decision to work together on Find My was followed by a three-month period of review, updates to the original specification, and once that was set, work on the relevant device operating systems.

When will it be available?

Introduction of Find My support on Android might also require Apple’s own devices be updated to support the new specification. That suggests either that Apple will accelerate introduction of iOS 17.5 (unlikely, given that it was only recently made available in beta and is expected in May), or that it may have found some other way to introduce cross-platform support; perhaps it’s already in the system. iOS 17.5 is significant for two more reasons: Not only will it allow EU developers to sell software to iPhone users directly from their websites, but for enterprise users it will make it possible to enforce a beta version during automated device enrolment.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Android, Apple, iOS, Mobile

New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI)-as-a-service providers such as Hugging Face are susceptible to two critical risks that could allow threat actors to escalate privileges, gain cross-tenant access to other customers' models, and even take over the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. "Malicious models represent a major risk to AI systems,

New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI)-as-a-service providers such as Hugging Face are susceptible to two critical risks that could allow threat actors to escalate privileges, gain cross-tenant access to other customers' models, and even take over the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. "Malicious models represent a major risk to AI systems, Newsroomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The German state, Schleswig-Holstein, has decided to move away from proprietary software, such as Windows and Office, to open-source alternatives , including Linux and LibreOffice . The move is motivated by the need to "ensure that their data is kept safe with us, and we must ensure that we are always in control of the IT solutions we use and that we can act independently as a state," as stated by Dirk Schr¶dter, the digitalization minister for Schleswig-Holstein.

Compliance requirements are meant to increase cybersecurity transparency and accountability. As cyber threats increase, so do the number of compliance frameworks and the specificity of the security controls, policies, and activities they include. For CISOs and their teams, that means compliance is a time-consuming, high-stakes process that demands strong organizational and

Buried inside just about every smartphone is a capability that few people take advantage of but that I have come to rely on: the ability to turn my phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot. And since I got a 5G-capable phone — and 5G mobile networks have become reliably available in many places my day takes me — I can supercharge my hotspot with enough data and speed for my entire crew.

You don’t need to run out and buy a 5G phone to turn on a hotspot or even to access 5G networks. You only need a 5G phone to access the fast speeds of 5G. If you come to depend on hotspotting the way I have, though, those blazing 5G speeds are a great reason to upgrade as soon as a 5G network is available to you.

When I travel (or my office internet goes south), my phone provides more than enough data to keep me working. It has become my favorite way to stay on top of work wherever I am. I can read and send emails, move data back and forth on remote servers, and even get a taste of the latest office gossip from the comfort of my full-sized device — without compromising security or paying for a separate mobile data device or line.

A phone hotspot is a helpful collaboration tool for a group of businesspeople attempting to work together. I can imagine it being used for, say, colleagues on the way to the airport in a van who might finish a group presentation, or even an accounting team working in a conference room with an internet connection independent of the company they’re auditing. And when you add in 5G speeds, it becomes a serious business advantage.

The best news, though, is that you probably don’t need to buy anything to make this work. Most reasonably recent Android and iOS devices can do it. And using your phone as a hotspot is generally already included in your monthly plan. (With some service plans, though, after you use a specified amount of data, your service provider will slow your connection — sometimes to antediluvian 3G levels.) One big problem: using your phone as a hotspot chews through battery power very quickly.

After talking to representatives of phone makers and networks about their products and testing the speeds you can get on the three 5G networks in my area, I’m convinced that every mobile worker, and many office-bound ones, will want to have a 5G phone in hand that’s ready to dole out data at top speed as soon as there is a network available to them.

What follows are answers to 14 hotspotting questions you probably have, as well as some insight as to why this tool belongs in every worker’s pocket or bag.

14 burning questions about smartphone hotspots 1. What is a phone Wi-Fi hotspot? 2. How do hotspots work? 3. What is 5G? 4. How secure is a phone hotspot? 5. Which phones can be used as hotspots? 6. What is mobile hotspot data? 7. Which networks support Wi-Fi hotspotting? 8. What speed and range can I expect? 9. What kind of devices can connect to a phone hotspot? 10. Where can I use a hotspot? 11. Is the setup hard to do? 12. How does using a hotspot affect battery life? 13. How does using your phone as a hotspot compare to having a tablet or laptop with a data card built in? 14. How does using your phone as a hotspot compare to using a dedicated mobile hotspot?

Read on for the answers, along with step-by-step instructions for using phone hotspots.

1. What is a phone Wi-Fi hotspot?

Regardless of whether you have a 4G or 5G handset, at its essence, a hotspot is a blend of software, hardware, and back-end network data services that work together to transform your phone into the equivalent of a broadband modem and router. In other words, it can create a Wi-Fi network to distribute a web connection to nearby devices.

This not only lets me get my laptop and tablet online, but I can share it with co-workers if they are within range. All I have to do is give them the password.

Some phones also allow tethering via Bluetooth and USB cables, but as you might imagine, these techniques are less popular than Wi-Fi.

2. How do hotspots work?

A phone hotspot works just like a dedicated mobile hotspot device, but because it’s right inside the phone, there’s nothing extra to charge, carry, or try not to lose. The way it works is simple: When the phone is connected to the mobile data network, it converts a 4G or 5G data stream into a Wi-Fi signal that nearby devices can share.

More specifically, the device treats its online connection to the data network as a broadband data source. The newest handsets then transmit this data locally like a mini-Wi-Fi router using the 802.11ax protocol. The net result is that Wi-Fi devices within range can tap into the data signal as if it were a regular old Wi-Fi network — because that’s exactly what it is.

A phone hotspot uses a cellular network to connect to the internet, and typically shares that connection via Wi-Fi.

Computerworld / IDG / Getty Images

Think of it as a variation on the wireless theme. Forget about the traditional setup you might have at home or the office, where a wired broadband connection feeds data to a router that sends it out as a wireless signal. Here, the phone/hotspot grabs data from the mobile network and retransmits as a Wi-Fi signal to all in range — with the password — to use.

Happily, none of this affects how the phone works. While my phone is feeding data to laptops, it can still view web sites on its own screen, make calls, and respond to texts.

3. What is 5G?

As 4G/LTE networks begin to show their age, 5G is taking over the mobile data scene. Despite the catch-all name, it isn’t a single network. It is, rather, three networks of differing frequencies and capabilities. Each use different frequencies, with the higher frequencies transferring more data within a shorter range.

It is 5G’s ability to operate at super high frequencies that makes 5G’s ultra-fast speeds possible. Unfortunately, because they have a short range, these higher frequencies require service providers to build more base station towers to transmit the signal. Your experience will depend not only on how far you are from the tower but which frequency it is using.

Some ISPs compare the range of networks and their ability to move data to a tiered layer cake that gets smaller as it gets higher. Imagine that the small top layer has the fastest speed but a much shorter range, while the lower level has wider range but slower speeds. Your data speed depends on how high on the cake your slice was cut from.

• Low-Band: The cake’s base layer is the widest of the cake and uses spectrum between 600MHz and 850MHz. It has the greatest range and easily passes through obstructions and windows, so it is the one you will encounter most often. It often uses the same spectrum as 4G and will likely replace it over time. Speeds are slower than mid- and high-band 5G but can hit several hundred megabits per second, although it might lag to less than a megabit per second if the cell site is overloaded. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all have networks in this range, but T-Mobile has the largest buildout at this point.
• Mid-Band: With frequencies between 1GHz and 6GHz, mid-band networks are the middle layer of the cake. Sometimes called C-band, the bandwidth can reach as high as 900Mbps, but you pay for it in range that’s reduced to a few miles from the tower. This will limit its use to urban areas and along major roads. AT&T built this part of its network out early in the 5G race.
• High-Band: Also known as Millimeter Wave (mmWave), this band is the top and smallest tier of the cake. It’s also the most data-heavy layer. It primarily uses the 24GHz to 40GHz spectrum in the US and can move upward of 3Gbps of data, but it has trouble penetrating obstructions. Reaching a maximum one-mile radius, you will likely encounter it, for the most part, in public spaces like busy urban areas, sports arenas, and shopping malls. Verizon has been out in front with its Ultra-Wideband network in this range but is still in only limited areas.

4. How secure is a phone hotspot?

Using a phone hotspot can actually increase your security profile by helping you avoid insecure public hotspots in coffee shops and hotels. At the phone end of the equation, your connection is just as secure and private as making a phone call or web surfing with your phone. And the 5G networks take security to a new level with 256-bit AES encryption, the ability to block fake mobile network transmission sites (known as stingrays) and encrypting the phone’s ID during transmissions. This is only the case if the network implements these defenses, though.

Regardless of which generation phone and network you are using, a VPN can build a stronger wall around your communications by adding an extra layer of AES 256-bit encryption. But this security does often come at the cost of performance. Between the phone and the clients connecting through it, recent phone hotspots use the password-protected WPA3 standard.

5. Which phones can be used as hotspots?

It turns out that almost every Android or iOS phone on the market can be turned into at least a 4G Wi-Fi hotspot. Not only that, but many tablets that have built-in mobile data modems and can do this as well. If your phone supports 5G and is in range of a 5G network, that’s what it will use for hotspot connections. Otherwise, it will drop down to a 4G network, if that’s all it can find.

Look for the 5G logo.

5G phones will typically display a “5G” logo in the upper right near the signal strength bars, replacing the “LTE” or “4G” one. Every major phone maker has 5G models, and there are even budget-priced 5G phones that can help stretch your IT budget.

That said, a phone hotspot can’t compare to a traditional router in terms of range. Any devices that want to connect to it will have to stay pretty close to your phone. Still, you can expect to create a zone of connectivity that might reach 65 feet, which can be very handy. (A stationary router can usually blanket a roughly 100-foot range with Wi-Fi.) This should be plenty for your own use or even for a small group huddled around a conference table.

6. What is mobile hotspot data?

Mobile hotspot data is simply data that you transmit via a hotspot, whether that’s your phone or a dedicated hotspot device. You should look at your mobile plan before you start relying heavily on your phone as a hotspot, though. Most of the business plans — and many consumer plans — from the Big Three (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) include hotspot use, sometimes called tethering, in one way or another. But even when your talk-time and texting is unlimited, many networks limit your hotspot use to a set amount of data per month at full speed (anywhere from 3GB to 120GB, depending on your plan). After you hit the max, your service provider might drop your speed drastically.

Many cellular providers offer separate hotspot data plans for use with dedicated hotspot devices. If your hotspot data needs are high, a dedicated hotspot device and data plan might be the way to go.

7. Which networks support Wi-Fi hotspotting?

Because it is treated like other data, all mobile networks support the use of a phone as a hotspot. As mentioned above, though, it’s important to understand how much hotspot data you get with your plan — and upgrade to a better plan if needed. Here’s a rundown of what each of the Big Three national networks offers.

AT&T

Business customers have the choice of several plans, ranging from the Business Unlimited Standard subscription, which starts at $70 per month (for the first line) and includes 5GB of hotspot data per phone, to the Business Unlimited Premium plan, which starts $90 at per month with hotspot data topping out at 200GB.

For consumers, AT&T’s Unlimited Starter, Extra, and Premium plans come with 5G access for $66, $76, and $86 per line per month (for a single line), respectively. The plans include 5GB, 30GB, and 60GB of hotspot data per line per month.

When you reach your monthly allotment of hotspot data, all AT&T accounts drop the bandwidth to about 128Kbps for the rest of the month.

T-Mobile

With access to the network’s 4G and 5G infrastructure, T-Mobile’s business plans start with the Business Unlimited Select subscription at $60 per line (for the first line) with 5GB of high-speed hotspot data per phone. At the top end is the Business Unlimited Ultimate plan, which starts at $85 per line and offers 100GB of hotspot data per phone. Once you’ve reached the limit, data speed drops to 3G levels of around 100Kbps.

As for consumer plans, T-Mobile’s Essentials plan provides unlimited use of hotspotting at 3G speeds for $60 for one line a month. Getting 4G/5G data speeds starts with the $70 Magenta plan, which includes 5GB of hotspot data, while the $85 Magenta MAX plan ups that to 40GB of high-speed hotspot data with unlimited 3G speeds afterwards.

Verizon

The major business mobile phone plans with hotspot data at Verizon are Unlimited Start 5G, Unlimited Plus 5G, and Unlimited Pro 5G. All include unlimited mobile hotspot use and give you the best price if you sign up for paper-free billing and autopay.

• The entry-level Unlimited Start 5G plan costs $30 per line and includes 5GB of 4G/5G hotspot data. After that the speed drops to 600Kbps.
• The Unlimited Plus 5G plan costs $35 per line and includes 50GB per line of hotspot data before dropping to 600Kbps for 4G LTE & 5G connections; if you’re near a 5G Ultra-Wideband cell site, the speed is limited to 3Mbps.
• The Unlimited Pro 2.0 plan is the top tier and costs $45 per line. It includes 100GB of high-speed hotspot data and — like the Plus plan — drops to 600Kbps (4G LTE & 5G Nationwide) and 3Mbps (5G Ultra-Wideband) after that.

Consumers have the choice of the Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Ultimate plans. The Unlimited Plus plan comes with 30GB of hotspot data for $80 (for one line), and the Unlimited Ultimate subscription includes 60GB of hotspot use for $90. Hotspot speeds drop to 3Mbps of 5G Ultra-Wideband data and 600Kbps of 4G/5G data after your allotment has been used per month.

8. What speed and range can I expect?

As 5G replaces 4G LTE as the base speed, the actual results you’ll see depend on lots of factors, including how congested the internet is, how far you are from the closest cell tower, and how many other devices are using that same cell site. Most of all, though, it depends on the type of network you’re connected to, with the 5G high-band connection being the best. I’ve gotten nearly 500Mbps (plenty for 4K video, downloading a large presentation or supporting my small group of data hogs) or as low as 100Kbps (enough for individual email and web work but hardly enough to support a group).

By connecting three phones to a hotspot-connected iPad, I tested the 5G networks in the metro New York City area at four locations. For the AT&T network, I used a Samsung Galaxy A53. For the T-Mobile and Verizon networks, I used a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 5G Ultra and Google Pixel 6. I used Speedtest.net’s bandwidth meter to measure upload and download speeds. All the tests were within 10 minutes of each other for better comparisons.

My tests may be unscientific and anecdotal, but they still give a good indication of what you can expect. I found the results to be eye-opening. T-Mobile led the pack with an average download speed of 234.8Mbps, indicating its lead in building out 5G networks. Next was Verizon at 171.3Mbps and then AT&T at 100.9Mbps. It’s important to note that any of these speeds would satisfy a small group of users.

The surprise was that all three networks had upload speeds of over 25Mbps, with some breaking 60Mbps. This is more than enough to support high-quality hotspot videoconferencing. Hello, work from anywhere!

As far as the range I got from the phones, the Pixel 6 handset led at 75 feet before it lost contact with my iPad, followed by the Galaxy A53 at 70 feet. The Google Pixel 6 had a range of 65 feet. Any of this would serve to fill a conference room or bus with Wi-Fi data.

9. What kind of devices can connect to a phone hotspot?

A phone hotspot can work with any Wi-Fi-based device, including laptops, tablets, other phones, and even game consoles. (I don’t judge what you do in your off-hours.) Think of it as just another Wi-Fi source, only it comes from your phone.

Most Android phones can connect up to 10 devices at a time, while iPhones from the 4S model to the current iPhone 13 can accommodate up to five connections at once, although it’s possible your network will limit this to four clients. Because it’s a communal resource, the more users sharing the internet throughput, the lower the speed for each connected device.

10. Where can I use a hotspot?

Using a hotspot is not limited by where you are, as long as your phone is connected to your service provider’s data network. In fact, any place you have a signal strong enough to use the web on your phone, you can generally use it as a hotspot with good results. Over the years, I’ve used phone hotspots in my home, office, trains, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. I’ve even used it while hiking to bring up a trail map on a tablet screen so the map would be large enough to read.

Your phone can be a lifesaver as well if your office’s data connection suddenly goes south. My office’s internet connection became unreliable last month, so I simply started using my Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G as a hotspot and kept everyone up and running until the problem was resolved. It wasn’t as fast as I’m used to, but it kept the emails and data exchanges flowing.

11. Is the setup hard to do?

It is very easy to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot from your phone. In fact, it’s one of the easiest configuration changes you can make. It’s different for iPhones and Androids but should take no more than a minute or two. A word of advice: For security purposes, be sure to change the network name and password.

Setting up an iPhone or iPad as a hotspot:

1. Start on the Home screen and tap the Settings icon.
2. Open the Personal Hotspot section.
3. Tap the slider switch to Allow Others to Join. (If you’re still using iOS 12 or earlier, the slider just says Personal Hotspot.)
4. Instructions now appear near the middle of the screen and the network’s password near the top; the network name is the same as the name of your device.
5. I suggest for security’s sake changing the password by tapping the Wi-Fi Password section and typing in a new one.

Turning on an iPad’s hotspot and changing the default password.

Brian Nadel / IDG

Setting up an Android phone or tablet as a hotspot:

Because of the variety of models, providing instructions for Android phones is a little trickier. I’ve included instructions for my Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G using Android 12, but depending on its software and network, your phone might be slightly different.

1. Swipe the Home screen up or down to bring up the apps and open Settings.
2. Tap Connections, then scroll down and tap Mobile Hotspot and Tethering, and then tap Mobile Hotspot to enable it. Depending on your software, your menu wording might be different (such as “Wireless & networks” instead of “Connections”), and you might need to tap More to find the tethering and hotspot option.
3. Open the Mobile Hotspot section to do everything from changing the network name and password to picking whether you want the hotspot to run on the 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi network. You might need to tap Configure to make changes.
4. If you scroll down, at the bottom you can see how many devices are connected to your hotspot network.

Enabling a hotspot on my Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G.

Brian Nadel / Computerworld

Connecting a device to a mobile hotspot:

Once you’ve enabled the hotspot, devices discover it by scanning for Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity. Only users you’ve shared the password with can connect to it, though.

Start by opening the Wi-Fi settings for your laptop or tablet, look for new networks, and locate yours. Then enter the password. The system should link up in less than a minute.

Some Android devices offer a shortcut to hotspot connections with a QR code. To do this:

1. Tap the QR code icon in the hotspot phone screen’s upper right; it now displays a QR code.
2. Aim the camera of the phone or tablet you want to connect at it and snap a photo.
3. Tap to confirm you want to connect.

All told, it takes about 10 seconds to accomplish and get online.

Some Android devices let you scan a QR code to make the hotspot connection without a password.

Brian Nadel / IDG

Disconnecting from a mobile hotspot:

Disconnecting a device from a mobile hotspot is exactly the same as with a more stationary one: either turn the Wi-Fi data exchange off or switch to another network.

Important: To prevent trailing a Wi-Fi signal wherever you go, it’s a good idea to turn the hotspot off as soon as you’re done with it. Your battery will thank you.

12. How does using a phone hotspot affect battery life?

Unfortunately, turning on the hotspot abilities of your phone is like firing up a micro router, which seriously cuts into your phone’s battery life. So if there’s an AC outlet nearby, plug in. I can get about 36 hours of use with occasional calls, texts, emails, and web work on my Galaxy S20 Ultra phone, but when I also used it as a hotspot feeding data to a ThinkPad T470, which was playing videos, it lowered my battery life to about 12.5 hours. That’s a 65% decline, though it still left more than a full day of work and mobile internet.

13. How does using your phone as a hotspot compare to having a tablet or laptop with a data card built in?

The ultimate convenience on the road would be to have a data connection built into every piece of mobile gear, but that would be an expensive proposition. To add mobile a data card to a notebook or tablet generally costs $100 to $200 for the networking hardware and a monthly usage fee from the cell provider. This might make sense for those who travel constantly. But for occasional travelers, using a phone as a hotspot is more cost effective.

14. How does using your phone as a hotspot compare to using a dedicated mobile hotspot?

Another option is to buy a dedicated mobile hotspot device, along with a hotspot data plan. These can, typically, run for a full workday on a battery charge, and some can connect up to 15 clients, all while weighing just a few ounces. Most mobile hotspots fit easily into a shirt pocket or small briefcase compartment. But even this will cost an extra $100 to $200 for the hardware and add a line to your cell plan.

Note, though, that a dedicated mobile hotspot can do something else: deliver up to 2TB of common storage space for all connected users to share. That can hold anything from a group presentation to archived business records for collaboration sessions. If that suits your needs better than using your phone, it’s certainly an option.

Global hotspotter

In recent years, my travels have taken me to such far-flung places as Washington, DC, Maine, China, Korea, Central Europe, Great Britain, and the Caucasus mountains. In every place, I used my phone as a hotspot to connect my laptop, tablet, and often my travel companions’ devices to the internet, with wildly mixed results.

I connected at reasonable speeds in a hotel in The Hague, Netherlands, on the train from Shanghai to Beijing, and on the island of Malta. My worst Wi-Fi experience occurred recently near New York City’s Bryant Park, where I could barely get a megabit per second of throughput.

The best hotspot connection I got was just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, NYC, where I hit a peak of nearly 500Mbps. It was more than enough to make me feel like I was at my office with access to all my files and the ability to video chat. In other words, I felt like I owned the world, or at least the internet. 

The oddest place I used my phone as a hotspot was near Mount Shahdagh, Azerbaijan, close to the Dagestani border. Even though it felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, I got about 100Kbps of bandwidth, meager by most standards but lavish in such an isolated place. I fed the data into my iPad to check my email and look over a map.

The bottom line is that the connection and your hotspot speed is only as good as both your phone and the network it’s using. As 5G takes over, data speeds should increase for hotspot connections, but rural areas, because there are so few people there, will probably continue to be serviced with slower connection speeds. For those who take the road less traveled, this can be an annoyance.

When there’s no network to connect to, every phone is just a small box with a screen and buttons. My advice is to check the OpenSignal coverage maps (available via its mobile app) before going anyplace off the beaten track, so you’ll know ahead of time if you’ll be able to get online and share the connection with your phone’s hotspot. The addition of maps with the closest 5G towers is a big help.

This story was originally published in November 2011 and most recently updated in April 2024.

Mobile, Small and Medium Business, Smartphones, Wi-Fi

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 7,497 years of covering Android closely, it’s that a lack of any apparent pattern with a company’s Android upgrade performance is actually a pattern itself.

It’s a slightly strange thing to say, I realize, but hear me out: With one key exception, we tend to see the same story year after year when analyzing Android device-makers’ commitments to getting current software into the hands of their highest-paying customers — and that’s a story of up and down, up and down. Over and over and over again.

Sure, we’ll have a cycle or two where one company does unexpectedly great, and everyone on the internet rushes to crown them the new King of Android Updates™! That makes for a nice pithy headline in the moment, sure. But those of us who prefer to slow down and take a bigger-picture view of the platform know the folly of such declarations. (And that’s to say nothing of the other cardinal sin with drive-by Android upgrade hot-takes: looking only at the time it takes a manufacturer to deliver a single, often limited rollout for a single, current-gen phone instead of considering how it treats all of its flagship-level customers — even those whose devices might be a year or two old.)

That’s precisely why I started doing these Android Upgrade Report Cards way back in the platform’s prehistoric ages. From the get-go, we’ve seen some wild variance in how well different device-makers support their products after you’ve finished paying for ’em — and as an average phone-owner or perhaps even business-wide fleet manager, there’s no real way to know what’s gonna happens six months or a year after you or your employees shell out stacks of dollars for a top-tier device.

It’s in part just par for the course with the nature of Android as a platform. The operating system is open source, and that means each device-maker can modify it how they want (for better or sometimes for worse). And consequently, that means the responsibility falls on each company’s shoulders to process every new incoming Android version and get it out to its customers.

[Get level-headed knowledge in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter. Three things to know and try every Friday!]

While we can’t control the level of care and commitment each company puts into that process, we can control our own knowledge about how different device-makers do or don’t prioritize post-sales support. That way, you can at least have the context you need to make an educated decision about which phone is right for you or your organization — not just for the first few weeks that you own it but for the entire two-year, three-year, or maybe even longer period that you’re likely to carry it around.

Now that we’re six months past the launch of Android 14, it’s time to step back and look at who’s making upgrades a priority and who’s treating ’em as an afterthought. Only you can decide how much this info matters to you (hint: It oughta matter — a lot!), but whether you find post-sales software support to be a top priority or an irrelevant asterisk, you deserve to be armed with all the data that empowers you to make fully informed future buying decisions.

Want the full nitty-gritty on how these grades were calculated? You can find a detailed breakdown of the formula and every element taken into account at the end of this article.

Google

Google/JR

• Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagships: 0 days (50/50 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach previous-gen flagships: 0 days (25/25 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back flagships: 0 days (15/15 points)
• Communication: Excellent (10/10 points)

Probably the least surprising element of any Android upgrade discussion is the fact that Google reliably gets it right. One would certainly hope that’d be the case, right?!

But the consistent level of difference in post-sales software support between Google and literally every other Android device-maker out there really is astounding. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Google is the only Android device-maker that makes an unwavering commitment to providing timely and reliable software updates — and makes that a formal part of its products’ promise.

And remember: It isn’t only about longevity. Yes, Google caught up to Samsung on that front and then raised the stakes further by pledging a full seven years of software support for its Pixel 8 last year — and yes, Samsung then responded in kind by offering the same seven years of support starting with its Galaxy S24. That’s fantastic, on both counts!

But once you start looking at the actual experience each company provides within that framework and how much of a priority it makes it to deliver those updates to you, you quickly realize that Google is still in a league of its own.

As per its typical standard, all of Google’s currently eligible Pixel devices — including both models of the regular current-gen Pixel, the newer flagship-tier Pixel Fold, and the previous-gen Pixel flagships from one year and two years back — started receiving Android 14 on the same day the software was released.

(For the purposes of this analysis, by the way, it’s the start of a rollout — to a flagship phone model in the US — that counts, as you can read about in more detail at the bottom of this page.)

Perhaps most noteworthy, as will become increasingly apparent as we continue this analysis, is the fact that Google treats all of its phones as equals — meaning that even if you own a previous-gen device, a two-year-old flagship phone, or a lower-priced Pixel “a” model (be it current or an older model), you still get major updates like Android 14 at the same time as the current-gen flagship phone owners. That’s a sharp contrast to the way every other device-maker handles its lineup, and it’s very much the way things ought to be.

And while Google’s usual “rolling out in waves” asterisk always applies to a certain degree — with some Pixel owners not receiving the software on that very first day — Android 14 made its way to all supported Pixel devices within a reasonable amount of time and without the need for any extra communication beyond the company’s initial announcement.

For the standard caveat here: Sure, we could argue that Google has a unique advantage in that it’s both the manufacturer of the devices and the maker of the software — but guess what? That’s part of the Pixel package. And as a person purchasing a phone, the only thing that ultimately matters is the experience you receive.

As usual, the results tell you all there is to know: Google’s phones are without a doubt the most reliable way to receive ongoing updates in a reliably timely manner on Android. It’s the only company that makes an explicit guarantee about that as a part of its devices’ purchasing package, and it’s absolutely the only one that consistently delivers on it, year after year.

Samsung

Google/JR

• Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagships: 44 days (46/50 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach previous-gen flagships: 62 days (22/25 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back flagships: 67 days (13/15 points)
• Communication: Poor (0/10 points)

Going back to my musings at the start of this story: If there’s one way in which Samsung has been consistent with its Android upgrade performance over the years, it’s that the company is consistently inconsistent in how long it takes to get current Android software into the hands of its highest-paying customers.

This year, Samsung did reasonably well: a second-place finish, with an 81% B- score — not too shabby at all, especially relative to Samsung’s typical standards.

When you look back a little, though, you’ll see how much those standards shift over time. Last year, with Android 13, Samsung scored an unfortunate 73% C. The year before that, with Android 12, the company came in with an 83% B. And the year before that, with Android 11, it was a 68% D+ (ouch!).

In spite of a curious consensus among many tech writers that Samsung is somehow absolutely killing it when it comes to upgrades, the company just can’t be counted on to deliver current smartphone software in a reliably timely manner. That’s true sometimes even for its current-gen flagships, though those usually see updates within a quarter of a year or so, at least (as of more recent Android upgrade cycles). It’s especially an issue once you get to Samsung’s older devices, which tend to be where the company really starts dropping the ball.

That being said, again: This year wasn’t too terrible. The current-gen (at the time of Android 14’s release) Galaxy S23 phone took just over a month to see its update, at 38 days, while the then-current-gen folding flagship Galaxy Fold 5 took 49 days. It may not be earth-shattering speed, but it’s reasonably respectable.

It’s the two-plus months on the second-gen and two-year-old flagship that pull the company’s score down from where it could and arguably should be. And then also the annoyingly normal Samsung approach of keeping customers completely in the dark about its progress along the way and offering no meaningful communication about what’s happening and when a rollout might begin.

All of that is to say nothing about the added disadvantage that’s very present with Samsung phones in particular around different device variants. Unlike Google, Samsung tends to send Android updates to one specific variant at a time — meaning, for instance, the Verizon version of a phone might get an update first, then the AT&T or T-Mobile or unlocked model might not start its rollout for another few weeks to even a month or more down the road. This doesn’t affect the company’s overall score for the purposes of this analysis, but it’s certainly a factor worth mentioning and one that frequently adds to the frustration expressed by the company’s customers.

Long story short: It’s easy to score a positive headline with one token delivery, and if we were looking only at the one-dimensional layer of the rollout to a single current flagship, we’d probably say Samsung is absolutely killing it — just like all the other publications that aren’t diving so deeply. Once you start looking at a company’s complete performance across the board, though, the story isn’t always so simple.

And — yup, you guessed it — things only get worse from here.

OnePlus

Google/JR

• Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagships: 110 days (38/50 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach previous-gen flagships: 113 days (19/25 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back flagships: 83 days (12/15 points)
• Communication: Poor (0/10 points)

Speaking of roller coaster rides, OnePlus is giving Samsung a run for its money in the up-and-down, consistently inconsistent department when it comes to its Android upgrade performance.

This year, OnePlus is decidedly down in its results — with a disappointing D+ score and delays of three to four months for most of its top-tier devices. These numbers are actually lower than the company’s performance the past couple years, with 77% and 76% C grades in those cycles, though a bit better than its Android 11 effort before that (which was a barely-passing 60% D).

For perspective: Back in 2020, OnePlus was on fire. It was finishing up a solid three-year streak of holding the second-place spot in these analyses and steadily increasing its performance with each subsequent cycle. Then — well, something clearly changed.

Just like Samsung, what adds insult to OnePlus’s injury is the fact that it is absolutely awful about communicating with its customers. Wade through the official OnePlus forum, and you’ll find pages upon pages of comments from frustrated phone-owners who are either desperate for any shred of info about when their top-of-the-line device will see its increasingly aging software update or are pulling their hair out because of problems with the rollouts that have started.

All in all, it’s just not a great result — though compared to the next Android device-maker on our list, it certainly could be worse.

Motorola

Google/JR

• Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagships: Still waiting (0/50 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach previous-gen flagships: Still waiting (0/25 points)
• Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back flagships: Still waiting (0/15 points)
• Communication: Poor (1/10 points)

I’m running out of ways to say this, so I’m just gonna quote myself from our last Android Upgrade Report Card — because there’s no possible way to sugarcoat it anymore: Motorola simply does not care about updates. It makes little to no effort to support its customers with reasonably up-to-date software after a purchase has been made, and we see the same exact story year after year. After year.

As of this moment (and as per usual), Motorola has yet to roll out a single Android 14 upgrade to any flagship phone in the US — or anywhere, for that matter. Motorola’s message here has been painfully consistent for a while now: If you buy a Moto phone, you’re gonna be waiting a good long while to get current software, if you ever get it — and you’re gonna be waiting in the dark, too, with no meaningful communication from the company about what’s going on or when you can expect to see any progress.

On the latter front, in January — a quarter of a year after Android 14’s release — Motorola provided an initial list of which devices should be getting the software, without any even the vaguest hint of when said rollouts could actually get going. It’s something, in terms of communication. But just barely.

It’s enough to get Motorola a single barely-there-effort point, though, leading to that appropriately pitiful-looking 1% F score.

Such a disappointing devolution for a once-mighty Android contender.

Wait — what about everyone else?

Does this list seem shorter than you were expecting? Alas, this is our current Android hardware reality, at least here in the States at this moment.

One-time Android regular LG is no longer around, as the company bowed out of the phone-making game entirely in 2021. And early Android veteran HTC has been off the grid since 2021’s Report Card, given the fact that it’s barely even putting out new phones anymore — certainly not flagship-level devices. If the company ever comes back around and attempts to get in the game again at any point, I’ll eagerly add it back into the list for inclusion.

And then there’s Sony — a company a random reader will ask me about on occasion but that just doesn’t make sense to include in this list right now. Sony has never had much of a meaningful presence in the US smartphone market (which is a shame, really — but that’s another story for another time), and in recent years, its role in the US mobile market has dropped from “barely anything” to “virtually nothing.”

I can’t even begin to make head or tails of Sony’s convoluted, confusingly named phone lineup anymore, but the company sent out its first Android 14 upgrade in early November and continued chipping away at its list through the start of 2024. It certainly wouldn’t be topping the list if it were included in this analysis, but it’d be another addition to the middle-of-the-pack, C-range section if it had any meaningful US presence.

What about Nokia? That company has a fairly limited presence in the US, but it had generally done a solid job of keeping its phones updated with both major and minor OS releases and with monthly security patches up until 2021, when Google’s Android One program started quietly falling apart. These days, Nokia’s taking its good sweet time to get current software onto its devices — with rollouts just getting going in the past several days — so even if it were included in this analysis, it wouldn’t be a remarkable result.

Last but not least, there’s Nothing — the hype-loving small-scale phone-maker from OnePlus founder Carl Pei. Nothing has been doing (ahem) virtually nothing in terms of communicating about its software support progress with its paying customers, but its earliest hint of an incoming Android 14 upgrade happened in mid-December, for its current-gen Nothing Phone 2 model, and it didn’t even start talking about an upgrade for its one-year-old Nothing Phone 1 flagship until early February. Suffice it to say, its score wouldn’t be spectacular if it were significant enough to include in this breakdown.

In detail: How these grades were calculated

This Android Upgrade Report Card follows the same grading system used with last year’s analysis — which features precise and clearly defined standards designed to weigh performance for both current and previous-generation flagship phones along with a company’s communication efforts, all in a consistent and completely objective manner.

Each manufacturer’s overall grade is based on the following formula, with final scores being rounded up or down to the nearest full integer:

• 50% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagship phone(s)
• 25% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach most immediate previous-gen flagship phone(s)
• 15% of grade: Length of time for upgrade to reach two-cycles-back previous-gen flagship phone(s)
• 10% of grade: Overall communication with customers throughout the upgrade process

Notably, 2023’s Android 13 analysis marked the first time the formula was expanded to account for flagship phones that are two generations back in addition to the most recent previous-gen models. With the de facto standard support window stretching to a minimum of three years, it made sense to take a broader view and see how different device-makers are actually doing when it comes to supporting those older models — as a promise of support alone only means so much. How long it actually takes for those phones to receive updates is equally important. And the scores here now reflect that, extending further into a phone’s lifespan.

Upgrade timing often varies wildly from one country or carrier to the next, so in order to create a consistent standard for scoring, I’ve focused this analysis on when Android 14 first reached a flagship model that’s readily available in the US — either a carrier-connected model or an unlocked version of the phone, if such a product is sold by the manufacturer and readily available to US customers — in a public, official, and not opt-in-beta-oriented over-the-air rollout.

(To be clear, I’m not counting being able to import an international version of a phone from eBay or from some random seller on Amazon as being “readily available to US customers.” For the purposes of creating a reasonable and consistent standard for this analysis, a phone has to be sold in the US in some official capacity in order to be considered a “US model” of a device.)

By looking at the time to Android 14’s first appearance (via an over-the-air rollout) on a device in the US, we’re measuring how quickly a typical US device-owner could realistically get the software in a normal situation. And since we’re looking at the first appearance, in any unlocked or carrier-connected phone, we’re eliminating any carrier-specific delays from the equation and focusing purely on the soonest possible window you could receive an update from any given manufacturer in this country. We’re also eliminating the PR-focused silliness of a manufacturer rushing to roll out a small-scale upgrade in somewhere like Lithuania just so they can put out a press release touting that they were “FIRST,” when the practical implication of such a rollout is basically just a rounding error.

I chose to focus on the US specifically because that’s where this publication (and this person writing this right now — hi!) is based, but this same analysis could be done using any country as its basis, of course, and the results would vary accordingly.

All measurements start from the day Android 14 was released into the Android Open Source Project: October 4, 2023, which is when the final raw OS code finished uploading and became available to manufacturers.

The following scale determined each manufacturer’s subscores for upgrade timeliness:

• 1-14 days to first US rollout = A+ (100)
• 15-30 days to first US rollout = A (96)
• 31-45 days to first US rollout = A- (92)
• 46-60 days to first US rollout = B+ (89)
• 61-75 days to first US rollout = B (86)
• 76-90 days to first US rollout = B- (82)
• 91-105 days to first US rollout = C+ (79)
• 106-120 days to first US rollout = C (76)
• 121-135 days to first US rollout = C- (72)
• 136-150 days to first US rollout = D+ (69)
• 151-165 days to first US rollout = D (66)
• 166-180 days to first US rollout = D- (62)
• More than 180 days to first US rollout (and thus no upgrade activity within the six-month window) = F (0)

There’s just one asterisk: If a manufacturer outright abandons any US-relevant models of a device, its score defaults to zero for that specific category. Within that category (be it current or previous-gen flagship), such behavior is an indication that the manufacturer in question could not be trusted to honor its commitment and provide an upgrade. This adjustment allows the score to better reflect that reality. No such adjustments were made this year, though there have been instances where it’s happened in the past (hello, Moto!).

Last but not least, this analysis focuses on manufacturers selling flagship phones that are relevant and in some way significant to the US market and/or the Android enthusiast community. That, as I alluded to above, is why a company like Sony is no longer part of the primary analysis — and why companies like Xiaomi and Huawei are not presently part of this picture, despite their relevance in other parts of the world. Considering the performance of players in a market such as China would certainly be interesting, but it’d be a completely different and totally separate analysis, and it’s beyond the scope of what we’re considering in this one report.

Aside from the companies included here, most players are either still relatively insignificant in the US market or have focused their efforts more on the budget realm in the States so far — and thus don’t make sense, at least as of now, to include in this specific-sample-oriented and flagship-focused breakdown.

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Android, Android Security, Google, Mobile, Samsung Electronics, Security