IT Employment Trends:
Much Better than National Trends

In the face of rising national unemployment, IT workers continue to experience lower unemployment across most occupations. While the comparable overall unemployment rate was 8.9% in 3Q:09, it was much less for many IT occupations. If low unemployment is a measure of demand, computer and information systems managers are in the highest demand category, followed closely by computer programmers and computer software engineers.

Nationally, average weekly wages improved incrementally by 0.2% in the past year despite an increase of 2.4% in hourly wages. Why? Because over the same period the number of hours worked declined by a similar amount of 2.1%.

That trend was somewhat similar for technology workers, although the magnitude of the change depended upon the specific occupation. For example, those working in data processing, hosting and related services saw, on average, their hourly wage grow nearly 15%. However, they ended up with a paycheck that was only 11.2% higher because their hours were cut by 3.1%.

IT professionals in custom computer systems design and related services experienced a comparable trend. With an hourly wage that rose 2.6% and weekly hours that fell by 1.3%, they ended up with only a 1.3% raise in their weekly paychecks.

Interestingly, those working in computer systems design services experienced the reverse. Despite working 0.5% longer, their weekly paycheck was essentially flat (up only 0.1%) because hourly wages declined by 0.4%.