High-Tech Job Market Showing Signs of Recovery

After several years of stalled projects, budget cuts and pink slips, the high-tech job

market is showing signs of life.

”This isn’t a maybe situation,” says Tom Silver, a senior vice president at Dice, Inc.,

an Urbandale, Iowa-based online recruiting company for high-tech professionals. ”Things

are definitely looking up. Certainly, the environment for tech professionals, and the

demand for them, has improved.”

Silver says at the beginning of the year, the Dice Web site listed between 28,000 and

29,000 high-tech jobs. Today, it lists 44,000 jobs.

”Tech professionals bore the brunt of the downturn in the last few years and now they’re

starting to see it pick up,” adds Silver. ”Companies are seeing economic conditions

improve and there’s more confidence on the hiring side of the house. IT-related projects

are coming off the back burner.”

For the last three or four years, CIOs and business executives have been putting the brakes

on IT projects. Operating systems have not been updated. Data bases have not been expanded.

Wireless has not been added. Companies saved money by tightening the purse strings, but now

a lot of infrastructure is due to be updated or replaced.

And Silver says the updating — and the spending — is starting to happen.

”They felt they could delay their infrastructure improvements and save some money,” says

Silver. ”But you can only do that for so long. They wanted to go from Windows 98 to

Windows 2000, but never got there. Now they’re going to Windows XP. They just have to. The

systems they have in-house don’t work as efficiently and as productively as they need them

to.”

Initiating those improvements means that there’s an increasing call for project managers,

according to Dice’s figures, which show a 21-percent uptick in demand for this skill set in

April.

”The demand for that particular skill took a pretty big hit in 2001 and 2002,” says

Silver. ”Certainly, they’re coming back now. It’s the need for an implementation

supporter. As the number of projects grows, the demand for project managers will grow.”

Other good areas include high-level programmers with experience in C++ and Java, and tech

workers with data base management skills.

What took the biggest hit during the downturn and is still suffering are the ‘soft skills’,

which Silver describes as Web site design, technical writing and lower-level programming.

”I think the overall demands for e-commerce and softer skills is still a bit off,” says

Silver. ”If you know Java or C++, that’s fine. But if you’re a technical writer or a

designer, those jobs aren’t coming back as quickly. It’s not a bad place to be but it’s not

coming back as well.”

Silver, though, notes that the high-tech job market would be a better place to be if it

weren’t for offshoring.

The fact that so many American companies are moving high-tech work to third-party vendors

in countries like India, China and Russia, has been causing a political upheaval here in

the U.S. Help desk-related jobs, as well as programming positions, have taken a

particularly tough hit.

And Silver says it shows in the number of jobs that are available within U.S. borders.

”At least so far, the majority of those jobs are lower-level programming jobs and help

desk-type of positions,” he explains. ”I can’t give you the exact number of jobs that

have gone overseas because the numbers are all over the place. But if offshoring weren’t

happening, there would be a broader and faster recovery for the tech market, without a

doubt. How much better? I can’t tell you. But this will continue. I don’t see offshoring

slowing down.”

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020