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After a slight rise in August, the tech unemployment rate plummeted nearly a full percentage point in September, showing the sector’s strength on the back of an unexpectedly powerful national jobs report.
As IT Brew reported, August’s tech unemployment rate stood at 3.4%, up from July’s 3.2%, indicating the unsettled nature of the economy as a whole. But September’s bounce-back numbers—an addition of 254,000 total jobs rather than the 150,000 economists were expecting—showed that the country’s outlook is trending positive.
Timing is everything. Tim Herbert, CompTIA chief research officer, said in a statement accompanying an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from the group that overall positive economic news helped push the tech unemployment rate down.
“It was never really a question of if, but when employers were going to resume hiring,” Herbert said. “A broad mix of companies viewed recent economic developments as the greenlight to move forward in addressing their tech talent needs.”
Tech employment increased by a net 8,583 jobs, CompTIA reported, with cloud infrastructure, data processing, and hosting accounting for 6,000 of those positions. IT and custom software services and system design came in second with 2,900 jobs; the gains were slightly offset by a 1,600 position drop in the telecommunications subsector.
Postings ticked up 118,000 from August, driven primarily by a 2,568 increase in tech support and 2,075 in software developers and engineers. Data scientists saw a loss of 797 postings.
State by state. California, Texas, Virginia, New York, and Florida remained the top five states for tech job postings; the top five metros were Washington, DC, New York, Dallas, Boston, and Atlanta.
Martha Heller, Heller Search Associates CEO, told CIO Dive that the jobs gains are in part due to the AI revolution.
“Right now, AI innovation is driving technology growth,” Heller said. “And what happens when we innovate in technology? We drive job growth in tech, and we drive job growth across the board.”