Dive Brief:
- Unemployment in IT reached 3.5% in February, matching levels of joblessness not seen since Sept. 2020, when it also hit 3.5%, according to a CompTIA review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published Friday.
- The statistic significantly narrowed a long-standing gap between national unemployment rates and IT unemployment. National unemployment reached 3.9% in February, up from 3.7% in the previous month.
- "We continue to see the lag effect of market developments working their way into government employment data,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, in a release.
Dive Insight:
It takes time for labor indicators to catch up to economic activity, which partly helps explain the numbers in the recent report.
Nearly 50,000 tech workers were laid off during the first two months of the year as a number of large providers pared back their workforce, according to self-reported layoff tracking site Layoffs.fyi.
Comparatively, January 2023 delivered nearly 90,000 layoffs across the tech workforce, as business reeled amid tighter macroeconomic conditions and geopolitical concerns.
IT unemployment jumped in February to highest levels since 2020
But the reporting lag doesn’t fully explain the abrupt jump in unemployment, said Herbert in an email to CIO Dive.
"It may be one of those outlier months where there isn’t a great explanation, along with the possibility of next month’s unemployment rate data returning to a range closer to the running 12-month average,” said Herbert.
Despite the uptick, other indicators bode well for technologists. Companies posted 185,000 new tech job positions in February, bringing the total number of open jobs to 436,000.
In response to ongoing shortages in specific skill categories, employers have turned to upskilling to bridge talent gaps.
"Competition for tech talent is high and has been for quite some time," said Steve Watt, SVP and CIO at Hyland. "It's the same reason the upskilling piece is so important to me."
Although the recent spike is notable after years of very low IT employment, the number has previously reached higher levels than those recorded in February.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, IT unemployment reached 4.6%. During the Great Recession and the dotcom crash of 2000-2002, the metric peaked at about 6.5%, according to CompTIA analysis.
