IT job market holds steady despite slight downturn

Tech job postings dropped slightly in February, but don’t look at that slip as indicative of a weaker market—IT sector hiring is still where it’s at.

CompTIA chief technology evangelist James Stanger told IT Brew that he sees the current drop as part of a return to the mean, but that’s not a bad thing: “We’ve been in record territory…in terms of hiring.”

“Even though there has been a lowering, it’s a regression to a mean that…probably [existed] around 2018 or so,” Stanger said. “And we’re not even down to that level, nowhere near it—and even the 2018 level was incredibly high.”

A CompTIA analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that IT worker unemployment rose to 2.2%, still lower than the national level of 3.6%.

As IT Brew reported last month, while jobs are being shed in traditionally tech-heavy regions like Silicon Valley, East Coast cities like New York and Washington, DC, are becoming IT hubs. Stanger told IT Brew that’s largely because of the expanding role of tech in government and industry. Those trends will lead to an increase in jobs based around cybersecurity, compliance, and the like in areas and industries around the country.

“For the last 30 years, the tech sector was like Silicon Valley,” Stanger said. “We’re so far removed from that kind of thinking now, in terms of how technology is used.”—EH