Survey: IT hiring on the rise into '04

Almost three quarters of respondents said they will add IT workers

By Thomas Hoffman

November 18, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The so-called jobless recovery may soon not be so jobless for IT professionals, according to a survey of 300 human resources managers and recruiters.
In that survey, conducted in late August by New York-based Dice Inc., the vast majority of respondents, 72%, said they plan to hire technology professionals during the next six months. Dice runs an online job board for IT professionals at www.dice.com.
"This is a huge difference from the survey we conducted last year," said Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice. He was referring to the fact that 70% of respondents to the 2002 survey said they expected to hire fewer people than they did in 2001, while 49% of this year's respondents indicated that they intend to hire more workers than they did in 2002.
The survey didn't explore the types of positions that are in greatest demand, nor did it assess hiring trends for specific vertical industries, said Melland. However, he said an analysis of his company's online job site shows that demand continues to remain strong for "traditional, hard-core IT positions" such as Oracle, Unix and SQL database and systems administrators.
Industries where demand for IT workers is strongest include aerospace and defense and financial services, said Melland.
While job growth in Silicon Valley and the West Coast continues to lag that of East Coast cities such as Washington and New York, Melland said he believes that steady growth in venture capital investments that began last spring should translate into job creations in the San Francisco Bay area starting in the first quarter of 2004.
The e-mail-based survey was conducted and paid for by Dice. It covered a cross-section of companies, with nearly half of the respondents representing traditional employers and the other half made up of recruiters and staffing firms.

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