Tech Industry Employment Bucks April's Lower-than-Expected Job Numbers

U.S. tech industry employment has grown steadily for five months now with tech companies adding 16,000 new jobs in April.

That’s according to CompTIA‘s analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Employment Situation Summary. The jobs added in April include technical and non-technical positions.

So far this year, tech industry employment has increased by 60,900 new jobs.

Employers across all sectors of the economy reduced their hiring of IT workers by an estimated 234,000 positions. This was the first decline after four consecutive months of employment gains. For the year, IT occupation employment has increased by 72,000 positions.

Employer job postings for open IT positions held steady in April, increasing by a modest 1,690 over March. In all, job postings totaled nearly 309,000.

CompTIA’s report comes as the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the country as a whole added just 226,000 jobs last month. Analysts were expecting closer to 1 million.

Exploring Career Options

Tim Herbert is CompTIA‘s executive vice president for research and market intelligence

CompTIA’s Tim Herbert

“As employers increase hiring activity, expect more tech workers to explore their career options,” he said. “In a competitive labor market, companies will need to be even more diligent in their approach to work practices and corporate culture in retaining tech talent.”

All five tech occupation categories showed solid employment growth last month. IT services and custom software development led with 6,200 new jobs, followed by information services, including search engines (+3,400) and telecommunication (+3,300). Computer and electronic products manufacturing (+2,100) and data processing, hosting and related services (+1,600) were also in positive territory.

California, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and Florida had the largest month-over-month increase in IT job postings, according to CompTIA. Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles, Dallas and Sacramento had the strongest performance among metropolitan areas.

Industries with significant numbers of job openings for IT professionals in April included: professional, scientific and technical services; finance and insurance; manufacturing; information; retail trade; public administration; health care and social assistance; educational services; and transportation and warehousing.

Employers continue to seek out software and application developers, advertising 93,500 open positions last month. That’s more than the next four occupation categories combined. Still, demand for core IT talent remains solid. Employers advertised open positions for IT support specialists, systems engineers and architects, systems analysts and IT project managers.