IoT, Cloud Hype 'Not Translating Into New IT Jobs'

Bad news for job seekers: The IT job market growth continues to sputter this year, falling behind the pace of 2015.

That’s according to Janco Associates’ analysis of the latest employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In the first quarter, the BLS revised downward the number of IT jobs created in 2015 — it now says that 112,500 new IT jobs were created in 2015 versus the 125,700 initially reported in its January data release.

At the same time, Janco’s analysis of the BLS data shows that the moving average of new IT jobs created continues to fall and remains at a growth rate of a paltry .4 percent.

“With only 19,000 new jobs created year to date, the number of new IT jobs created is 30,100 jobs behind the pace of 2015,” said Victor Janulaitis, Janco’s CEO. “Considering that 2015 was a year where IT job market growth slowed, this is a bad omen.”{ad}

Uncertainty from both political and international instability is driving the slowdown in IT hiring, he said.

“We feel that through the remainder of the calendar year, only 72,000 or so new jobs will be added to the already created 19,000 jobs,” Janulaitis said. “All the hype of the Internet of Things and cloud-based applications is not translating into new IT jobs.”

Janco interviewed more than 80 chief information officers in the last several weeks as part of its semiannual salary survey data collection process. CIOs were much less optimistic this year than at the same time last year, it said.

A preliminary hiring forecast by job levels within the IT function shows that long-term hiring plans for both IT staff and contractors/consultants is flat.

“Instability is not a friend of IT expansion,” Janulaitis said. “In periods like the one we are going through, CIO and IT managers are pushed to cut costs and often see a reduction in necessary IT infrastructure spending in areas like training, software and hardware upgrades, and elimination of nonessential consultants, staff and IT initiatives.”

As baby boomers retire from IT, many of those positions are not being filled, according to Janco.

“On the plus side, CIOs report that chief financial officers are now limiting incremental spending for IT-related activities to those that have good business cases with support from the operational side of their enterprises,” Janulaitis said. “Few IT initiatives are being approved to upgrade technology for the sake of IT’s desire to have the latest new thing.”