IT Job Market part 2
According to the U.S. Department of Labor's employment forecast, Information Technology (IT) is one of the ten fastest-growing areas over the next 10 years. The best IT jobs are: Social network developers, Business Intelligence analysts, Network security specialists, and Software Architects. These jobs have potential to increase by 53% by the year 2021. Other fast-growing jobs include software engineers (with a growth of 44%), Information Systems Managers (39%), Database administrators (29%) and Systems engineers (25%). In addition to these specialties cited by the U.S. Department of Labor, other IT occupations expected to have high growth include Software project managers, Computer systems administrators, Information research scientists, and Network systems managers. Not all IT jobs will experience growth in the U.S., for example programmer, tester positions are expected to decline by 14% due mostly to outsourcing.
The major factor of this fast growth is the aging and retiring of the Baby Boomer generation (Born between 1946 – 1964). As a result, the need to replace workers who retire is projected to create a significant number of additional job openings in the information technology area. However, the decrease student enrollment in IT in the past decade have resulted in a critical shortage of IT workers. According to the forecast, many companies are fighting over skilled IT workers. Most executives want to make sure that their IT employees are not leaving for better jobs somewhere. A senior executive told the Wall Street journal “I did not expect the hiring to be this hot but every company is hiring. I look up this month advertising, there are 75,000 software engineering job openings in the U.S. I wonder where do companies find these people?”. In a study conducted last month, 54% managers said they expect hiring to get more aggressive this year and the next four years as more people are retiring. Companies have also been warning that IT workers are getting restless. As more job are openings, people who stayed in “less-than-ideal” jobs during the recession are jumping at a chance to find something new. The study found that about 25% of IT workers are actively seeking new job and companies are taking steps to retain their workers too. The most popular retention tactic is giving IT workers more flexible work hours with increase in salaries, providing better career opportunities; granting more promotions; increasing bonus at the end of the year, etc. Despite these efforts, many companies are still having difficult to hire IT workers, which led to several debates in U.S. Congress about “Open immigration” policy to bring in more foreign IT workers under the H1B visa to meet the demand.
For many years, The U.S. Congress has been debating about special immigration law for skilled workers without any conclusion. There were many opinions, some positive and some negative but as the debate is still going on, many companies could not wait. They are increasing the amount of outsourcing and bring in more foreign workers to work in the U.S via the H1B visas. Few months ago, a major California newspaper conducted a survey of high tech companies on the hiring of H1B visa holders. They found that nobody know exactly how many foreign IT workers are working in the U.S. legally or illegally. Most software companies seemed to keep a “Quiet attitude” when asked about foreign IT workers. A representative of HP told the newspaper that his company does not track its numbers for H1B visas. Another representative of Cisco simply said that: “There is a shortage of technically skilled workers in the U.S and as his company hiring has increased in recent years, so has the use of H1B to fill some positions”. The newspaper concluded that the actual number of IT foreign workers was much higher than the official data as many H1B workers continue to work even their visas have expired. The debate heated up when an U.S government agencies accused several Indian companies were bringing in many H1B visas workers, exceeding the quota allowed. At the same time, a study from university of Maryland reported that workers with H1B visas earned more money than U.S. workers as they worked more hours, including weekend and most of them did not return home after their visas expired. The report also raised an alarm that more than 82% of foreign students who study information technology were hired for entry level works despite that they cannot legally work in the U.S. However, as the demand is so high, many software companies did overlook this issue. The report found that since 1998 over 4 million H-1Bs have entered and remained in the country and as many as over a million IT foreign students also remained in the U.S. These data has led to more debates but in the mean time, companies continue to increase the amount of IT outsourcing as the economy begin to recover.
The Economic Times reports today (April 2011) that Indian outsourcers are getting ready for more growth. The big five IT services companies—Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies are on a hiring spree, adding thousands of new workers in India. In just few months, these companies hired over 114,000 developers for them and created a critical shortage of IT workers for local smaller IT companies. The strong hiring is expected because of the significant increase in outsourcing contracts from the U.S. and Europe as more companies are recovered from the global financial crisis. However, the growth is also a sign that the Indian outsourcers want to dominate this market by having larger scale, more technical areas to fend off smaller companies from other countries. Recently, more countries are jumping into this highly lucrative market, notably Brazil, Mexico, and many Eastern Europe countries as they all want to have a bigger piece of this market. According to the latest studies, Indian outsourcing companies have made approximately $96 billion USD in 2010 and could reach over $100 billion this year.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
