Dive Brief:

• The unemployment rate for tech professionals increased to 2.3% in June as the number of tech occupations across the economy dropped by 171,000 positions, according to CompTIA’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
• The tech unemployment rate last month was up slightly from 2% in May, but it continued to trail the national rate of 3.6% in June. At the national level, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed people, roughly 6 million, remained largely unchanged since May, BLS said Friday. 
• Tech sector companies increased headcounts by 5,348 last month, making up for May's reduction of 4,725 jobs. The May drop represented just 0.1% of the industry's total workforce, CompTIA said.

Dive Insight:

Halfway through 2023, tech employment has remained largely stable after an uncertain end to last year and a Q1 start defined by big tech layoffs. 

Unemployment has remained low, despite some slight increases for tech workers so far this year. June's 2.3% tech unemployment rate was the highest so far this year, matching the rate seen last August. 

Yet, the tech unemployment rates seen this year are still well below the three-year high from August 2020, when the IT occupation unemployment rate reached 4.6%. That rate peaked at 6.5% during the Great Recession and dot-com bust, CompTIA said. 

Employers remain cautious around future hiring, as the number of tech job postings "declined modestly" in June to just under 236,000, from nearly 242,000 in May, CompTIA said. Almost 9% of the job postings were for positions related to artificial intelligence, up from 6% in May, CompTIA found. 

Mixed signals continue to permeate across the economy as private employers added nearly 500,000 jobs in June, according to ADP's analysis of its fine-grained anonymized and aggregated payroll data of 25 million U.S. employees. 

The higher-than-expected job creation in June was the result of a strong month for the consumer-facing service industry, ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson said in a statement. "But wage growth continues to ebb in these same industries, and hiring likely is cresting after a late-cycle surge."

A far cry from the skyrocketing salaries that were a hallmark of the Great Resignation last year, median changes in annual pay are leveling out. Those who stayed in their job saw a 6.4% increase year-over-year, down from 6.6% in May, ADP found.

Job changers, however, have seen 12 straight months of slowing pay gains. At 11.2% in June, it's the slowest pace of growth for job changers’ median annual pay since October 2021, ADP said.