Tech employment – losses and recovery

In previous articles, we have tackled the impact of the pandemic on various professions and industries. However, there has been a notable surge in innovation and employment in the tech industry.

This may come as a surprise to many. After all, the pandemic shook the foundations of global market overall, and everything with it. While the tech employment market did take a hit, the impact was substantially less than other industries.

Areas of tech such as cybersecurity, data analysis and science, and communication have been more essential than ever since the pandemic began, and reports confirm that tech employment was on the rise well before the pandemic began.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak until July, the number of jobs in the tech sector had risen by 200,000 while people in other sectors were being laid off. Later however, came the decline. According to Indeed, in June, companies began to slowly cut away at the number of IT jobs made available. Tech employment posts were down as much as 36% by the end of July.

According to an analysis by CompTIA of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent study, IT jobs across all sectors have declined by around 134,000.

Technical IT jobs and help desk work seem to be doing slightly better than others. Companies are still trying to navigate the turbulent changes of the pandemic, and the transitions to remote work, and so most companies, even under economic strain, are reluctant to let go of any IT employees.

“Tech’s failure to recover is probably due to the high cost of hiring and firing”, according to Indeed in a statement to ZDnet “While a restaurant may take on workers based on demand experienced over the past two weeks, sectors like tech have much longer planning horizons.”