Despite Weak May US Jobs Report the IT Sector Remains Resilient

As the US stock market reacts to what is perceived as a weak overall US Department of Labor May jobs report, the IT sector continues to show its resiliency as tech employment continues to grow. Looking at the report’s overview of specific industry sectors, tech jobs as a whole eked out a slight increase in new job creation for the month of May. 

For more insight into specific trends into the tech job sector, a report by the TechServe Alliance titled “TechServe Alliance Employment Indices”, shows that for the month of April the number of IT jobs grew 0.2 percent sequentially to 5,107,200 and on a year-over-year basis, IT employment grew by 3.8% in the last 12 months adding 189,100 IT workers.

These numbers are in line with industry detail provided in the US Labor Department’s May jobs report. For example the report shows that data processing, hosting and related services grew by 0.1%; management and technical consulting services grew by 7.2%; and computer systems design and related services grew by 7.4%.

When commenting on the April TechServe report, CEO of TechServe Mark Roberts said, “IT employment continued its steady but unremarkable growth in April. On the engineering side, we saw the return of modest growth after ticking down the prior month. While there remains an air of uncertainty, we continue to see hiring in many technical skill sets continue at a solid pace. Employers and the employment market are not monolithic. While we are seeing weak demand in some industries, other industries such as management and technical consulting are showing remarkable strength.