Dismal IT Job Growth Expected for Remainder of 2017

Outside of some vendors and startup companies, the IT job market is flat and has not responded as well as the rest of the U.S. labor market.

The total number of new jobs added still trails the growth seen in 2016, with only 22,300 net-new jobs created in the first 10 months of the year, versus 66,500 last year, according to Janco Associates’ latest IT job market forecast. It’s based on its analysis of October data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Our forecast is that IT job market growth for 2017 will be the lowest it has been in the last four years, with just over 34,000 new IT jobs created,” said Victor Janulaitis, Janco‘s CEO.

The number of IT jobs has been impacted by the “devastating effect” of multiple hurricanes and fires, and the feeling by many C-Level executives that tax reform may not occur this year, he said.

“In the last three months, only 9,000 jobs have been added to the IT job market,” Janulaitis said. “Based on our conversations with scores of CIOs, CFOs and CEOs, the slowing is due to the impact of ‘events’ which have placed a focus on maintaining continual operations versus new technology and application deployment. As a result, we forecast that the overall IT job market will see only 12,000 new jobs added in the last two months of 2017. This equates to the creation of 34,300 new IT jobs in 2017.”

Non-IT based companies are keeping IT staffing levels flat, Janco said; however, software and hardware organizations are actively recruiting.

“We have seen a rise in hiring for startups and venture capital-funded firms,” Janulaitis said. “For example, there seem to be more startups in the mountain-region states of Utah and Colorado — signifying a move away from high-cost metro areas like the San Francisco Bay to more employee-friendly locations like Salt Lake City and Denver. As we reported previously, there continues to be a shrinking of telecommunication jobs due to mergers, layoffs and automation.  The jobs in that field have been automated (and) are permanently lost — that is a loss of over 27,000 jobs in the last 12 months. On the positive side, individuals who moved into telecommunications security seem to be in high demand.”