Have IT Vendors Been Hit Harder Than IT Departments?
March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
|
I don’t know about you, but I keep wondering where the disconnect is between the U.S. unemployment rate and IT departments. And if there is a disconnect, as there seems to be from looking at the data, I am grateful on both your behalf and my own. The rest of the IT Jungle team is grateful, too. None of us–you, me, and them–wants to become a statistic. Here’s what I am talking about. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did its monthly report on employment (or lack thereof) in America, and the news was not good. The latest BLS models (and it is a model, since these figures are seasonally adjusted) indicate that 651,000 people lost their jobs in February, boosting the total number of people who have been knocked out of work since the recession began in December 2007 to just a bit more than 4.4 million. The unemployment rate is now 8.1 percent, and it was hovering around 4.5 percent in late 2006 and early 2007, before the full extent of the mortgage and derivatives mess was known. The number of people unemployed in December and January were revised upward, by the way, so in a month, the February unemployment numbers could be revised upward as well. The monthly BLS report doesn’t track IT jobs directly, but does track job gains and losses by industry at a fairly fine level of detail. So you can sort of track the IT vendor community’s employment status in the States even if you can’t get a good picture of IT departments. It would be far better, as I have argued, for the BLS to do its industry tracking, as it currently does, but also track jobs by title. Then we could reckon how MIS managers or programmers are doing out there. Anyway, if you add up the bits of the monthly report that are IT-related–computer and electronic component manufacturers, telecommunications companies, data processing and other services, and computer systems design–then 15,400 jobs were deleted in February. That’s using the seasonally adjusted data. If you just look at the raw data, computer and electronic makers employed 1.25 million people in February 2008, but that number is now 54,000 people lower as of February 2009. (I don’t trust seasonally adjusted numbers except in a normal, growing economy–and maybe not even then.) Employment in data processing services was 265,400 a year ago, but has shed 12,700 people. The telecom biz had 1.03 million people a year ago, but now has 36,700 fewer people. Here’s the funny bit: using the raw data, companies engaged in computer systems design and related services had 1.42 million people on the payroll in February 2008, and using the unadjusted data, this has grown by 32,300 according to the BLS. So if these four areas are indicators of the overall IT vendor community, the net loss in jobs for the whole year is 71,100 jobs against a base of 2.55 million employees in February 2008. This is about as bad as the economy as a whole, which (again, using the unadjusted numbers) has shed just over 4 million of the 136.4 million jobs that were there in February 2008. The overall U.S. economy has lost 2.9 percent of its jobs by this math (that is not the same thing as the unemployment rate) compared to 2.8 percent of jobs for this IT vendor segment I have carved out of the BLS data. Now, what has me a bit perplexed is why some chief information officers are adding staff. With IT spending down, the experts at Robert Half Technology who recently polled 1,400 CIOs say that 8 percent of CIOs will hire new people in the second quarter, with only 6 percent saying they will drop IT employees; 83 percent of those polled said they would keep staffing levels the same, leaving 3 percent who seemed to be too confused to answer the question. RHT polled companies in the United States with 100 or more employees to get a sense of what is going on, and while that net 2 percent increase in companies hiring is a lot smaller than the 8 percent CIOs reported in the first quarter, it is still positive. “Not surprisingly, companies are being more judicious when hiring in today’s economic environment,” explains said Dave Willmer, executive director at RHT. “Budgets must support critical IT projects, and companies are re-examining their staffing needs accordingly. Among the areas where demand remains stable are help desk and technical support, and networking.” As you can see, the trend for IT staff hiring and firing is not moving in the right direction over the past two years. Here’s the RHT data showing that:
According to the latest poll, 21 percent of the CIOs who said they will be adding IT staff (or about 1.7 percent of the total pool of survey respondents) said they would be using a mix of full-time and project workers, and 8 percent who said they would add people in Q2 2009 said they would only add contract workers. Why are they hiring? About a quarter of the CIOs said “corporate growth” was driving IT hiring, while IT department expansion was cited by 9 percent; more workloads was cited as the reason by 8 percent of respondents, and another 8 percent said system upgrades was compelling them to hire staff. Help desk, technical support, network administration, and Windows administration are the jobs CIOs are trying most to fill.
For those letting IT staff go, 40 percent said it was due to IT budget cuts and 21 percent blamed the effect of the financial crisis on their industry. It is hard for me to separate these two, since they are related. If you want to see the full arts and charts that RHT put out, go to this link and scroll to the bottom for links to the graphics that provide more details. IT vendors have clearly shown that sales are dropping, particularly for PCs and servers, the basic infrastructure for IT. But thus far, U.S. companies seem to be putting off IT purchases so they can do IT projects that help their businesses. This is encouraging, so long as all of the work doesn’t end up overseas. Some of it will, of course. That’s just the 21st century. RELATED STORIES IT Jobs 2009: The Dot-Com Bubble Burst Was ‘A Cake Walk’ IT Doing Better Than Other Careers in 2009 IT Staffing Will Be Stable for Q1, Projects Robert Half CIOs in the States Say IT Hiring Still Happening in Q4 IT Jobs Grow in the U.S. Despite Economic Woes Most CIOs Say 2008 IT Budgets Are Stable, So Far
|
