Dive Brief:
- Unemployment among IT professionals reached 3.4% in August, up from 3.2% in July, according to a CompTIA review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published Friday. The U.S. unemployment rate fell slightly in August, from 4.3 to 4.2%.
- Tech occupations employment dropped 28,000 positions, marking the third consecutive month of declines.
- Despite the contraction, tech job postings grew to exceed 500,000 active open roles in August, with over 211,000 new postings added during the month. Postings for software developers, engineers and data scientists led the growth.
Dive Insight:
Despite a lengthy streak of very low unemployment, tech positions aren't immune to the dynamics playing out in the broader economy.
"The labor market’s strength keeps fading," said Nick Bunker, head of economic research at Indeed Hiring Lab, in an email Friday. "Large downward revisions to data from earlier in the summer put the 3-month average of job gains at 116,000 per month, lower than the pace needed to simply tread water and below 2019’s average clip.”
IT unemployment rose in August despite national dip
Layoffs in the tech sector also spiked in August to 26,000, according to self-reported layoff tracking site Layoffs.fyi. Cost-cutting and headcount rightsizing after large hiring efforts were two key drivers for staffing cuts, CFO Dive reported.
In addition to cooler economic trends, the interest in AI adoption is pushing executives to recalibrate staffing strategies.
AI is driving much of the hiring efforts in enterprise settings, as CIOs and other executives seek to fill specialized positions to support new initiatives. The share of job postings related to AI grew to 14.3% in June, up from 8.8% in late 2019, a CBRE review of Lightcast data found.
Tech hiring for AI specialists is set to grow this year and into 2025 as adoption continues, said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, in the report.
