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By Rob Garretson
Signs of economic recovery continue to emerge, particularly in the domestic IT job market, according to the TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group based in Alexandria, Va. US IT employment jumped by nearly 13,000 jobs in January, giving the start of 2010 the best month-to-month gain in IT employment since the recession took hold in late 2008.
The uptick in IT jobs comes after one of the longest and deepest recessions in a generation, which cut 200,000 IT jobs from the US economy, according to TechServe Alliance, which tracks monthly changes in IT hiring using its own analysis of government unemployment data. US tech employment peaked at about 4 million in November 2008, according to TechServe estimates, but eroded sharply throughout the first half of last year, before stabilizing beginning midyear.
Its estimate of total tech jobs lost to the recession matches closely the analysis released last week by IEEE-USA, part of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which said the ranks of US computer professionals shrank by 198,000 during 2009, citing its analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The unemployment rate for software engineers fell from 4.7% in the third quarter to 4.1% in the final three months of 2009, while the total number of software engineer jobs fell from 970,000 to 952,000, not quite a 2% dip. EEEE-USA attributed the decline to decisions by engineers to leave the field because of retirement, or to switch professions. About 82,000 software engineers and 78,000 computer scientists and systems analysts lost their jobs between 2008 and 2009, IEEE-USA added.
TechServe described the addition of 12,900 US IT jobs in January as "better than incremental," adding that "signs are encouraging that businesses demand for IT professionals and services is growing."
The return to job growth as the economy recovers dovetails with the longer term projections of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which predicts much faster than average growth across a range of IT fields over the decade that spans 2008 to 2018.
Employment of computer software engineers is expected to swell by nearly 300,000 jobs, or more than 32 percent, between 2008 and 2018. That rate is "well above the average for all occupations," according to the Bureau's recently release Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition. The fastest growth within the occupation is expected to be among engineers working on highly specific applications, as business spending increases in areas like cyber-security and mobile technologies.
The ranks of system analysts are projected to grow by more than 108,000, or 20 percent, through 2018, up from the more than a 5000,000 analyst jobs in 2008. Overall employment of computer network, systems, and database administrators is projected to increase by 30 percent from 2008 to 2018, much faster than the average for all occupations, adding 286,600 new jobs over the decade.
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