Telecom Layoffs Continue as Post Trump Election Confidence Fades

Two new studies forecast growth in the IT jobs sector in 2017 and a bleaker outlook for telecommunications.

CompTIA on Friday announced its employment tracker for June, showing that there were 8,400 new IT positions filled during the month. CompTIA puts the total number of new IT jobs at 61,900 halfway through the year. Manufacturing, transportation and retail led the way, while construction, food services, health care and hospitality trailed.

CompTIA’s Tim Herbert

“In the dynamic tech sector, it’s not uncommon for companies to be in hiring mode, while also shedding workers.” said Tim Herbert, senior vice president, research and market intelligence for CompTIA. “Tech companies pursuing new opportunities in cloud, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, or big data, for example, may shift resources to these areas, while scaling back in legacy product lines.”

Despite “solid” IT job gains that CompTIA attributed to a growing economy, telecommunications hiring has been suffering this year. The industry dropped 700 jobs in June, making a total of 43,800 jobs lost in 2017. That comes as no surprise considering the whirlwind of telco mergers and acquisitions. Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo’s Internet properties led to a massive cut, Windstream’s purchase of EarthLink eliminated hundreds of employees, and Vonage recently laid off 90 people due to “acquisition redundancy.”

That’s not to say IT companies haven’t been trimming. Rackspace cut 6 percent of its workforce earlier this year, and Microsoft recently laid off thousands.

Janco Associates noted that the telecommunications industry has lost 39,200 jobs in the last year, despite a growth of 88,000 IT jobs.

The company’s survey found that fewer companies are offering new executive and senior management positions in IT, although IT staff is increasing on the whole.

Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis says the executives his company interviewed expressed a wave of confidence after the 2016 U.S. election, but that sentiment has faded.

“It seems the tide has turned and they now feel there will be less growth in IT budgets for the remainder of this year.” Janulaitis said. “Hiring prospects are marginal at best, except for IT staff at the worker level in the latter part of this year.”