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Tech jobs continued their rebound in April from a dip in February as the unemployment rate for the sector fell to 2.8% from March’s 3%.
CompTIA reported a shifting employment landscape since the pandemic slowed, which has generally shown good news for tech industry workers, with a few hiccups. February’s spike in unemployment, up to 3.5%, appears to have been less of an indicator of bad times than an anomaly.
“Employers and job-seekers continue to navigate a shifting labor market,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, said in a statement accompanying the analysis. “Skills-first approaches to hiring and talent development are even more important against this backdrop.”
Number gang. Industry job postings rose by nearly 179,000 in April, part of around 415,000 total active postings. Of the top five posting subsectors, only systems analysts and engineers saw a rise at an additional 255.
The postings number was complemented by a 4,280 position increase from tech sector companies. The two biggest subsectors adding positions were IT and customer software services/system design, which added 5,600 positions for a total of 2,544,3000 workers, and cloud infrastructure, data processing, and hosting, which added 900 jobs for a total of 498,800 positions.
Total tech occupations across the entire economy dropped by about 20,000 in the same time period.
Location, location, location. CompTIA’s analysis also found that Washington, DC, is the top city for tech job postings, followed by New York, Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Employers are seeking people to fill, primarily, software developer, IT project management/data analyst/emerging tech, and data scientist positions. The top states looking for workers are California, Texas, Virginia, New York, and Florida.