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Report Cites Highest IT Job Growth In 4 Years
netbuzz writes "Employment research firm Foote Partners says U.S. labor statistics from last month reveal an increase of some 18,200 jobs in IT, which represents the largest such monthly jump since 2008. 'The overall employment situation in the U.S. is lackluster, in fact this is the fifth consecutive month of subpar results,' says David Foote. 'But the fact that more than 18,000 new jobs were created last month for people with significant IT skills and experience — and nearly 57,000 new jobs added in the past three months — is incredibly good news.'"
IT is a stupid classification anyway. It includes way too many different types of jobs. It could include everything from people working at the IT help desk all the way to people designing operating systems. That would be like looking at the "manufacturing sector" but also including the people who design the machines the manufacturing plants use. Sure an increase in manufacturing jobs means they need more machines, but you still shouldn't count them in the same lot.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It is extremely difficult to find highly skilled mid to senior level software engineers (here in NYC at least) unless you plan to pay over the top to seal someone away from another company. It seems to take at minimum a month to find someone, and thats if your a company with good benefits and great salary
for people with significant IT skills and experience
And the only way to get most of those skills or experience is to be employed in the industry and working for companies who are willing to train you. People coming out of school or switching careers need not apply.
This goes along with the 2012 report from ManPower (which just came out) which says more than half of the U.S. employers surveyed say their pay scales are not in line with what IT workers want, which makes it hard to attract and retain staff.
The report goes on to say that many companies have scaled back on recruitment benefits such as relocation costs.
In summary, you need to have years of experience in cutting-edge technology, willing to work for pay which employers admit isn't up to par and able to pay for your own relocation.
Gee, wonder why people are saying they can't find people to fill positions.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
See, to me your post is indicative of exactly what's wrong in IT hiring today. If you're looking for exactly the "right" person it probably means your making people play buzzword bingo. This is the lazy way to hire IT people and it does nothing to assure that you actually get a good candidate. Instead you need to hire someone with the correct level of experience for the job, some familiarity with subject matter of the position, and the ability to learn. That is ALL the qualification you should realistically need since even if they've used the exact same product at the exact same version level it's likely that your environment has enough differences to their previous experience that it might as well have been a different product. It's never taken me more than two weeks to hire someone. In fact the only position at my employer I would have trouble filling quickly is the one we outsourced after having four people in 3 years fail in our environment (we needed someone with Oracle and MS SQL experience and knowledge of our ERP platform, very very niche).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When I see job growth return to 1999 levels, then I will think things are getting better.
So you think things will be better if/when we see the fictitious job growth levels powered up by the dot-com speculative bubble, the time when it was possible for any greenhorn to get paid $60-70K a year just for writing html????? You are an interesting creature.
I for one prefer the status quo in IT/Software than the ridiculous dot-com bubble times. I would also say we are saturated - we have quite a few in IT/Software that are really not cut for this (testament of this is the shitload of crappy monkey code that exists despite all the advances we have made in the art and science of developing software.)