Dive Brief:
- Job postings for technology roles increased 5.3% month over month in October, according to a report published by CompTIA last week. The IT trade group analyzed data from market analytics firm Lightcast for the report.
- Nearly half a million open job postings were active last month, according to the report. Employers added 217,238 net new postings in October, a 3.8% jump from September.
- “Given the prevailing vibe of economic unease, the better-than-expected volume of tech job listings is a welcome bit of good news,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, in the report. “Once again it speaks to the many moving parts of the vast tech workforce and the not always apparent offsetting effects of job gains, job losses and job transitions.”
Dive Insight:
The CompTIA analysis comes amid a drought in official employment data, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has delayed the release of its monthly jobs report amid the government shutdown. The agency might never release data for the impacted timeframe, White House officials said Wednesday.
The lack of government data has put private sector data in the spotlight, including from payroll services company ADP, which determined private sector employers added 42,000 jobs to the economy last month. A Pew Research Center report found a strong correlation between the payroll processing company’s data and official BLS reports.
Despite some positive signals, the technology sector is still assessing the effects of significant layoff waves at major tech providers. IBM last week joined a string of employers in the sector that culled their headcounts by several thousand.
Layoffs are a sign of shifting strategies, according to Art Zeile, president and CEO of DHI Group, Dice’s parent company. Zeile pointed to thousands of open job postings at companies that announced cuts.
“You’ve got to see the big picture,” Zeile told CIO Dive. “Accenture announced 11,000 layoffs in October, but they had the fifth highest number of tech job postings in the United States at the same time.”
A Dice review of Lightcast job posting data showed a growth spurt in AI-specific roles as enterprise adoption of the technology progresses. Postings for cloud infrastructure architects increased nearly fivefold year over year, with some roles such as AI trainers seeing increases of more than 6,000%.
CIOs grappling with AI adoption plans can set up dedicated councils to govern the technology and manage its effects on the workforce.
“AI fundamentally affects every functional area inside of the organization that a CIO is supporting,” Zeile said. “And you need to get the buy-in of those functional areas.”
