Tech sector jobs growth a positive amid pullback in overall tech, CompTIA says

Technology sector companies in the aggregate added workers in September while employers throughout the economy reduced tech occupation staffing, according to analysis from CompTIA., a nonprofit association for the information technology (IT) industry and workforce.

Within the tech sector, employers increased employment by 12,643 positions, according to CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Report data. Employment growth was led by new hiring in IT and custom software services and systems design (up 10,400 jobs) and cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting (up 5,800 jobs).

Tech occupations throughout the economy declined by 189,000 positions, the report found. The unemployment rate for tech occupations rose slightly to 2.1 percent, moving directionally with the increase in the national unemployment rate which rose to 3.8 percent.

“The usual caveats of monthly fluctuations in labor market data apply,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The seesawing between strong and lagging tech jobs reports is undoubtedly confusing, but the overall macro trend of growth in the depth and breadth of the tech workforce remains steady.”

Employer job postings for future tech hiring totaled nearly 208,000 in September, a slight decline of 1.4 percent from the previous month. Job postings for information security analysts increased 19 percent from July to August, to more than 12,000 postings. Other in-demand occupations include software developers, tech support specialists, computer systems analysts and data scientists.

Denver, Washinton, Phoenix, Tampa, Philadelphia and Baltimore led metropolitan areas with the largest increases in the number of tech job postings from August to September. By industry, employers in the professional, scientific and technical services, administrative support and manufacturing sectors have the largest share of tech job postings. Positions in emerging technologies or jobs requiring emerging tech skills accounted for 23 percent of all tech jobs postings. Within emerging tech job postings, 37 percent were associated with artificial intelligence.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is a global information technology certification and training body. Each year CompTIA, directly and through its global network of partners, provides millions of people with training, education and certification.