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Obama Administration Claims There Are 545,000 IT Job Openings

Posted by samzenpus on from the are-you-hiring? dept.

dcblogs writes The White House has established a $100 million program that endorses fast-track, boot camp IT training efforts and other four-year degree alternatives. But this plan is drawing criticism because of the underlying message it sends in the H-1B battle. The federal program, called TechHire, will get its money from H-1B visa fees, and the major users of this visa are IT services firms that outsource jobs. Another source of controversy will be the White House's assertion that there are 545,000 unfilled IT jobs. It has not explained how it arrived at this number, but the estimate will likely be used as a talking point by lawmakers seeking to raise the H-1B cap.

2 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Dice plug by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.

    And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.

    Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!

    Dice! (am I doing it right?)

  2. Re:if that were true by Wycliffe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd like to see a salary floor for H1-B at 15 times minimum wage (or 10 times the poverty level, whichever is higher)... + a 20% administrative fee.

    That would probably curtail abuses of said system... it couldn't be abused for the purpose of bringing in cheaper labor then.

    I think requiring them to pay prevailing wage to the worker plus put an equal amount into a fund for STEM scholarships would work decent as well.
    Even if they fudge the numbers (which they do) and say it's only a 40k position, requiring them to pay an additional 100% premium to a scholarship
    fund should minimize the abuse that we're currently seeing.

    This could also work for other industries like truck drivers where the complaint is there are not enough drivers when the reality is that there are
    plenty of people who would be willing to drive if the pay was higher.