Postings for IT jobs are on the wane, having dropped considerably from pandemic peaks. Perhaps more concerning for IT pros is the sense that demand for their services may be at a 10-year low.
A recent study from Dice found that 2024 saw 2.24 million IT positions posted, a sharp drop from the 4.08 million IT roles that were posted in 2022, and lower than any previous year going back to 2014 when 2.20 million IT job listings were posted.
Forrester principal analyst Fiona Mark sees the drop in IT job postings coming from a wide range of economic as well as industry forces.
“Organizations are currently much slower to hire than they have been. There are the typical macroeconomic factors like economic uncertainty that are impacting overall hiring, but specifically to the technology space, we are seeing a combination of factors contributing to this downturn,” Mark said. “There’s a hangover from the tech hiring boom from a few years ago, which subsequently resulted in layoffs just a few years later. People do not want to go into that cycle again.”
Although Mark acknowledged that generative AI is playing a small role in that position reduction, she sees it playing a secondary role as well.
Even though “technology leaders might be pivoting investment in AI, overall budgets are not growing significantly, resulting in fewer new open positions,” Mark said. “With a continued focus on AI, with investments in AIOps and coding copilots, although it might not result in immediate layoffs, as teams go through organic attrition, leaders are not necessarily rushing to backfill open positions, and prefer to take a wait-and-see approach to determine whether their current employees can pick up the additional workload.”
Brittany Lutes, research director at Info-Tech, adds that a temporary drop in turnover is also likely playing a role. With fewer people leaving, fewer new job postings are needed.
“There is a lot more political and economic uncertainty. That is causing a shift in the market for people wanting to switch jobs,” Lutes said. “IT workers are saying, ‘I want to be in a steady and secure role.’ They don’t want to open themselves up to more uncertainty. They are more comfortable staying. They couldmake the jump to a new and exciting role, but they are saying, ‘Not now.’”
Lutes also said some of the change may be because IT is finding talent in new ways, beyond traditional job posting outlets.
“For many organizations, rather than actually posting or approaching people internally, they are reaching out to potential candidates in their networks,” Lutes said. “Tons of people are using LinkedIn or Instagram. This is how much of Gen Z has been entering the workforce.”
Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst for Moor Insights and Strategy, points out another wrinkle that makes using a decade of IT job postings as a barometer for IT demand more complex: Most of the positions posted as IT jobs 10 years are still on the books, but many are no longer labeled as IT.
“There are some IT job postings that have been reclassified,” he said.
As for AI, Kimball sees its impact not in reducing the number of IT jobs available but in evolving the kinds of talent, such as data scientists, that are being brought in. Moreover, it’s evolving who is brining that talent in, as other business units seek AI and machine learning expertise.
“Maybe the funding is coming out of the lines of business. It might be hired out of the CFO’s group. It really depends on who is funding the project,” Kimball said. “The costs are now being spread out through the business.”
Kimball also noted a specialty hiring issue CIOs experienced a few years ago in the cloud. Despite the cloud promising massive cost savings, CIOs found themselves having to hire specialists for each cloud platform to fine-tune those environments precisely — a significant expense.
Something similar is now happening with generative AI models, as enterprises seek to hire specialists with experience working with models from a range of vendors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, and DeepSeek.
CIOs “now are having to hire a new class of specialists, similar to the cloud,” Kimball said.
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Source: News