CompTIA: Overall Tech Employment Loses Ground

Technology companies added workers while tech occupations throughout the broader economy fell back in June, according to an analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics by CompTIA, a suburban Chicago-based trade association.

Tech sector companies increased headcount by 5,348 jobs last month, CompTIA’s analysis reveals. Among the six top level tech occupation categories three show positive gains through the first half of 2023 – IT and custom software services and systems design; PC, semiconductor and components manufacturing; and cloud infrastructure, data processing and hosting.

Tech occupations throughout the economy declined by an estimated 171,000 last month. The unemployment rate for tech occupations edged up to 2.3%, below the national figure of 3.6%.

Employer job postings for future hiring declined modestly in June, to just under 236,000. Nearly 49,000 tech job postings offered remote work or hybrid work arrangements as an option, while about 21,000 job postings were for positions related to artificial intelligence. Employer job postings for AI reached a new high point as a percentage of emerging tech postings (38%) and overall tech job postings (9%).

“The usual balancing act of weighing short-term monthly fluctuations in the data with longer-term projections comes into play,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA. “The latest tech employment figures do lag some, but the underlying fundamentals remain unchanged. All signs point to a continuation of the growth trajectory for the tech workforce.”

Employer hiring intent spans job roles across disciplines including software developers and engineers (64,957 June job postings), IT project managers, data analysts and related occupations (42,105), IT support specialists (22,898), systems analysts and engineers (17,029) and data scientists (15,131).

Among specific markets the Washington, D.C., metro area led the nation in total tech job postings for the month (16,452) and in the month-over-month increase in postings from May to June (+1,560). New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago rounded out the top five metro areas with the largest number of tech job postings in June.

Channel Impact^®
Although the news is clearly mixed, the tech sector, itself, appears to be faring better than a number of other industries.