IT Staffing

Employers added more than 200,000 technologists to the payroll in March, according to a CompTIA analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Friday.

The hiring boom followed a significant dip in February, when the economy lost 133,000 tech positions and IT unemployment soared to 3.5%. The rate dropped to 3.0% in March, as the tech sector added 6,000 jobs, further contributing to the economywide surge.

The numbers marked a “welcome return to stability,” CompTIA Chief Research Officer Tim Herbert said in a release. Prior to March, the number of IT positions declined for four consecutive months, dating back to October, when the economy added nearly half a million tech jobs.

Month-to-month hiring fluctuations smooth out over time, revealing reliably consistent demand for IT professionals in a technology-dependent economy.

When all the monthly numbers are tallied, the tech workforce is expected to add 300,000 net new positions this year, increasing 3.1% year over year, according to CompTIA’s annual market analysis report, published Wednesday.

“After periods of overperformance and underperformance, the overarching tech story remains positive,” Herbert said in the Wednesday release.

IT unemployment nearly matched the rate for all professions last month but fell below the 3.8% national rate in March, despite ongoing tech sector layoffs.

Collectively, 235 tech companies have laid off 58,000 employees since the start of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi tracking, including Google, Microsoft, IBM and, most recently, Amazon.

The cuts Amazon announced this week extend to the company’s massive cloud division. The hyperscaler will eliminate several hundred roles in its Sales, Marketing and Global Services organization and a few hundred positions in Physical Stores Technology, an AWS spokesperson told CIO Dive Friday via email.

The hyperscaler intends to continue growing its workforce in other areas and currently has thousands of open job postings, the spokesperson said.

Employers added 191,000 IT job postings in March, according to CompTIA’s analysis, bringing the total number of active openings for technology roles to 438,000. Software developers and IT support specialists saw the biggest postings bump from February to March, and AI skills were mentioned in 41% of postings in the emerging technologies subcategory during the month.

A dearth of technical skills is preventing businesses from infusing operations with new technologies, according to an Infosys report. The company commissioned a survey of 1,000 senior business leaders for the study.

Nearly three-quarters of surveyed executives said the pace of technological change surpassed their company's capacity to incorporate it into operations.

Pressed to find skills in a tight tech labor market, around 4 in 5 respondents said they prefer employees who are knowledgeable across multiple technology solutions over single-specialty experts.

Organizations must quickly deploy novel technologies to respond to market pressures and customer demands. Despite devoting resources and time to bring projects to fruition, companies often struggle to hire the talent that can bring them to life.

Specific categories are a clear and ongoing struggle for the enterprise. Infosys found a gap of eight percentage points between current skills and availability in roles related to advanced statistical analysis. Respondents reported similar shortfalls in machine and deep learning and cloud computing expertise.

Though recent official data points suggest an uptick in unemployment among IT roles, indicators of demand persist. Organizations added 185,000 new tech job postings last month, bringing the total of open jobs to 436,000, according to CompTIA.

Generative AI represents a top staffing challenge. Training in this specific technology category will be a priority as companies shape their talent strategies, according to Infosys.  

"To close these gaps, leading companies are increasing budgets for upskilling initiatives," the report said. "Hands-on training in AI, ML, advanced analytics and cloud technologies will be critical to ongoing success, and this highlights the need to balance skills required for basic infrastructure, such as the cloud, with those needed for emerging technologies such as AI."

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Though generative AI-related job postings remain a small sliver of technology positions overall, they've proliferated since last January, Indeed said in a report. 

The company said job postings directly related to generative AI skills spiked, going from 3 in every 100,000 job postings to 11 in 10,000 between January 2023 and February 2024.

"Growth in broader AI jobs is far more muted than growth in GenAI-specific jobs, even as the total level of broad AI jobs remains much higher," said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, in a blog post.

Deploying enterprise-grade generative AI requires talent. Far from a plug-and-play capability, the outcomes of technology use hinge on having the right skill set on board.

The talent market is reflecting this trend. A previous Indeed report found jobseekers with generative AI skills could expect a nearly 50% salary bump compared to competitors who lack them. On average, generative AI-savvy workers command salaries of average salaries of up to $174,727.

The speed at which the comparatively nascent subset of AI is developing is another factor making enterprise adoption challenging. 

Nearly 3 in 4 executives said the accelerated technology change is surpassing their company’s capacity to deploy advanced technologies like generative AI, according to an Infosys report published last week.

Tech employers are shifting toward AI in their approach to the talent market, according to Bunker. 

"For job seekers, this trend means tilting their interests and skills toward artificial intelligence if they want to land a tech role," Bunker said. "More broadly, increased hiring for AI-related jobs points toward deeper corporate investments in these technologies."

Employers had more than 436,000 open tech job postings in February, according to a CompTIA analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 1 in 10 roles in that category are related to AI or require associated skills, according to the IT trade group.

Communication, leadership and analytical abilities are the three soft skills in highest demand among job postings for engineers according to a LinkedIn report. 

Employers also prize problem-solving, teamwork and management skills as part of their candidate search, the report found. The company reviewed job posting data in India, the U.K. and the U.S. between May and October last year.

Soft skills can amplify the impact an engineer can have on the job, driving employers to look more closely for these skill sets, Ya Xu, VP of engineering and head of data and AI at LinkedIn, said in a blog post.

To meet technology aspirations, enterprises need talent in ample supply. Leaders also need teams that can operate smoothly,bringing soft skills like communication and collaboration to the forefront.

"You need people who not only nod towards collaboration, but they express the behaviors of what that means," said HFS Executive Research Leader David Cushman. Companies need to instill a sense of community, he said.

The rapid development of AI is also shaping how companies address the tech labor market.

"This new technology isn’t just changing the types of products or features we can build, it’s transforming the entire complexion of the engineering landscape, resulting in the emergence of new skills, jobs and entirely new ways of working within organizations," Xu said.

Job seekers are taking note of the shifting employer priorities and have responded in kind. AI fundamentals are among the top in-demand skills to have in today's job market, according to a CompTIA survey of technology job seekers. 

The deployment of AI, alongside the restart of previously deferred tech overhauls, is seen as a key driver for tech employment in 2024.

Following years of an all-out fight over tech talent, 2023 brought the first recent signs of a cooling tech job market. 

A key driver behind the slowdown were the layoffs roiling large tech providers, creating a ripple effect across industries. While not all staffers impacted by the cuts held tech positions, 260,000 people at more than 1,100 companies were laid off last year, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi.

Companies pared back their job postings for new tech roles, though unemployment in IT remained far behind the national averages for the entire year. Preliminary data shows average IT joblessness was 2%, well below the national average of 3.6%.

2023 was marked by fluctuations between tech talent availability and the end of big tech overhiring, but analysts expect the tech jobs market to return to more steady growth 2024. Driving that comeback are new IT projects kicking off as budgets return to normal and the lure of AI bringing more workers into the field.

This year, companies say they have bigger IT budgets than last year, which will make way for more new projects kicking off.

"That leads us to believe that this is only going to be a tighter technology market, and we do expect hiring and the demand for IT professionals to increase as we go throughout the year," Thomas Vick, senior regional director at Robert Half, said.

AI impacts on hiring

After a bearish 2023, leaders entered this year with plans to spend record amounts in IT capabilities, with deferred projects from last year landing in this year's budget line. 

Analysts described the scores of workers getting cut at the start of 2023 as the consequences of an economic souring and months of labor hoarding. "Last year was a real whiplash from the previous years," said Fiona Mark, principal analyst at Forrester.

Organizations took a more sober approach to talent attraction last year, focusing on their core services and aligning budgets with what allows them market differentiation, Mark said. 

Now, AI has caught the attention of enterprise leaders, shifting priorities in IT strategy as they incorporate new capabilities into workflows — from coding to the help desk.

The drive to AI adoption has shifted organizational focus and, in turn, guided where companies want to build up their skill sets, Mark said.

It's still early to see the full impact the technology will have on hiring trends, but Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, believes there are two key paths.

"You do see situations where companies have found use cases where AI is tasked with doing a very structured task, and that lends itself to almost a direct one-to-one replacement for what a human can do," Herbert said. "But we also have seen that companies, when they get into it, they immediately recognize that jobs are the summation of a lot of structured and unstructured tasks. It’s those unstructured tasks that are very, very difficult to replicate right now."

Interest in generative AI will also increase tech talent supply, as the shiny new technology brings more workers into the fold, according to LogicMonitor CIO Ryan Worobel.

"The buzz around it is creating a path that I think intrigues a lot of people," he said. "It gives them an opportunity to potentially get out of a rut."

Upskilling as a retention tool will remain a theme as leaders attempt to keep their organizations running smoothly amid the hot market for new skills. The novelty of rising AI applications suggests there's ample room for growth.

Still, unemployment trends in IT persistently show that qualified workers who want a job in IT can get one.

"It's not quite half the national rate but it is close to half of it," said Herbert. "That is just a continuing signal that it's a fairly tight labor market for tech talent."

Job seekers hitting the market with generative AI skills command an average salary boost of 47% compared to competitors without them, according to an Indeed report. The company reviewed job posting salary data on its platform.

Technology workers who are competent in generative AI can expect average salaries of up to $174,727, according to the company's analysis.

Generative AI sits alongside other key skills earning job seekers a salary premium including deep learning, computer vision and knowledge of specific software languages and frameworks such as Rust or PyTorch.

The job market fluctuations of 2023 are giving way to more stability this year, as enterprises resume once-deferred projects and spin up AI implementations. Job seekers with tech chops benefit from these efforts amid a shortage of specialized talent.

Data scientists, machine learning engineers and software engineers are some of the roles that require these sought-after skills.

"Half of the highest-paid skills in tech are AI-specific, which suggests that job seekers with AI skills can stand out in a competitive job market, and potentially earn more than their counterparts," the company said in the report.

Employers across sectors of the economy had nearly 400,000 active tech job postings in January, an uptick of nearly 34,000 from the previous month, according to CompTIA data. 

The scarcity of AI-related tech skills available in the market is causing a rift between talent demand and supply, said Brian Jackson, research director at Info-Tech Research Group.

"The number of data scientists available on the market, people with that real mathematical level understanding of how to model data, and bring in data warehouses… that's a big talent shortage," Jackson said.

Enterprise leaders can address the talent gap through upskilling and training opportunities. Despite interest in these opportunities, less than 1 in 4 developers say their employers provide time for upskilling or learning AI skills, according to a HackerRank survey. 

The vast majority of business leaders responding to a recent survey said they’re concerned they can’t train employees quickly enough to keep up with AI and tech developments in the next three years.

A similar amount said AI and other tech disruptions will require companies to rethink skills, resources and new ways of doing work, according to an April 4 report by the World Employment Confederation.

“It is clear that advances in AI have the potential to transform the workplace at an unprecedented pace, yet the growing technical and soft skills gap is a critical hurdle businesses must overcome,” Jonas Prising, chairman and CEO of ManpowerGroup, a WEC member organization, said in a statement.

“While Gen AI will revolutionize many aspects of work, there are elements of jobs that are, and will remain, quintessentially human: collaboration, communication, creative problem solving, and empathy towards others,” Prising said. “Organizations must cultivate these uniquely human traits and invest in upskilling and their workforce to succeed in this new digital era.”

In a survey of 715 senior executives worldwide, including 680 from Forbes Global 2000 companies and 35 public sector organizations, 80% said it’s never been this difficult to plan for future talent requirements.

Overall, 92% of senior executives said they’ll need a more flexible workforce in the next two years. They pointed to several strategies to build this flexibility, including sectoral talent pools, a skill-based approach to hiring, online talent platforms, higher use of contingent workers, more internal flexibility through inter-department secondments or job rotations and talent from other countries.

Notably, employers are increasingly looking to contingent workers for in-demand skills and talent, with 79% saying that employing these workers with knowledge of AI and new technology is an effective way to spread understanding to employees.

Ultimately, AI literacy will be key for workforce transformation, according to a CompTIA report. To build this literacy, employers can offer learning and development opportunities such as short online programs about AI basics, targeted training for specific job roles and hands-on experiences across a company’s existing workflows.

About 90% of HR leaders believe that up to half of their workforce will need to be reskilled in the next five years due to AI shifts, according to a PeopleScout and Spotted Zebra report. Incremental reskilling and upskilling could help, with employers communicating what the future of AI looks like in the company, addressing fears and ensuring employees receive the skills they need to meet those changes.

As AI reshapes the workplace, career development and learning opportunities will drive business agility and innovation, according to a LinkedIn Learning report. Although several barriers continue to exist for L&D, such as budget, C-suite leaders appear to be listening and are more open to conversations due to skill gaps around AI and other tools.