Dive Brief:
- Tech hiring trends held steady last month as employers gauged their 2025 hiring priorities, according to a CompTIA review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Friday.
- Unemployment for IT professions dipped slightly to 2.5% in November, down from 2.6% in the previous month. Tech professions across the economy fell by 6,000, a relatively small change in a workforce of 6.5 million workers.
- “While a flat month in the aggregate as some employers take a breather, the data continues to highlight the diversity of hiring activity across the tech workforce,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.
Dive Insight:
With the year coming to a close, businesses are gathering up resources to tackle 2025 hiring priorities.
The new year will bring operational shifts, as most IT leaders foresee structural changes existing to technology team. Info-Tech Research Group expects organizations to become less hierarchical, putting AI, data and other high-demand skills at the service of multiple business units in the coming months.
The broader economic and social context is also influencing hiring decisions in IT.
“Companies are preparing to add jobs when they have more clarity on the direction of the market,” said Jason Hayman, market research manager at IT consultancy TEKsystems, in an email. Organizations are still working through pandemic-era overhiring, stubborn inflation rates and the effects of an incoming presidential administration in the U.S., according to Hayman.
“There also isn’t any one geography or sector that is particularly hot or cold, making it more difficult to discern what the future might hold,” Hayman said.
After years of near-record lows, the IT unemployment rate ticked up during multiple months in 2024, reaching a nearly four-year high of 3.7% in June.
In 2025, global IT spending is set to grow by more than 9%, according to Gartner projections, marking a potentially positive sign for the start of new enterprise IT projects and higher demand for tech skills.
