Dive Brief:
- Employers across the economy added 70,000 technology positions in October, according to a CompTIA review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Friday. October marks the second straight month of tech job gains following a three-month slump earlier this year.
- Active job postings also increased last month to more than 528,000, according to the IT trade group. More than 12,000 net new job postings were added in October.
- Despite the positive signs, tech unemployment increased slightly to 2.6%, up from 2.5% in September. The national unemployment rate remained unchanged month-over-month at 4.1%.
Dive Insight:
The tech talent market showed signs of slowing down earlier this year. IT unemployment reversed years of record lows and rose back up to 3.7% in June, even as enthusiasm for emerging tech deployment and enterprise modernization remained strong.
IT unemployment inched up slightly in October
Since then, the key signal of demand for tech talent has continued to slide down. October's indicators reflect a "balanced approach to hiring across core tech job roles and innovation enabling roles," according to Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.
The BLS report flagged the impact of recent adverse weather events on employment data, including hurricanes in the Southeast. CompTIA noted there were 113,000 tech businesses in the hard-hit states of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Database architects and network system administrators were the two job categories with the highest month-over-month growth. Increases in these two categories align with the continued deployment of enterprise AI solutions, which rely on data and infrastructure.
Modernization drives up enterprise need for specialized talent, according to Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty.
"You're competing with a lot of companies that are out there trying to drive and transform their businesses and move them forward," Johnson said.
As businesses adopt emerging technologies like generative AI, demand for related roles drains an already small talent pool, Johnson said.
"There's a whole new set of skills that we just don't have enough people for," Johnson said.
