Job experts: Fresh skills key for a return to IT

IDG News Service - With no definitive measure of how IT hiring fared during the recession, job experts hold conflicting opinions about the residual effects on that sector.

Hiring experts offer anecdotes about some IT professionals who lost senior-level positions and took more junior-level jobs instead or of others who left the field entirely. One market watcher said Silicon Valley hiring managers are still unable to keep up with the flood of resumes. According to another, even at the downturn's peak, the IT field's unemployment rate hovered around 4.5 percent, or half of the U.S. national average.

"There's still ... a significant number of people in the greater Silicon Valley, Bay Area just in the tech sector alone, that are out of work," said Kevin Grossman, chief marketplace evangelist with HRmarketer.com, a marketing software and services firm for the human resources industry.

"Unfortunately there [are] quite a few" Silicon Valley IT professionals who have been unemployed for a few months to two years, added Grossman, who is also works with Focus.com, a business professional social network whose members offer advice on a range of IT and business topics.

U.S. Department of Labor unemployment data for Silicon Valley shows the recession did impact the region, though not necessarily IT.

Since April 2010, Silicon Valley's unemployment rate has tallied higher than the U.S. national unemployment rate, which has come in at approximately 9 percent over the past few months. The most recent U.S. Department of Labor figures, released Friday for June, place the national unemployment rate at 9.2 percent. In May 2011, 9.9 percent of the full-time work force in Sunnyvale, San Jose and Santa Clara, the California cities regarded as tech's heartland, found themselves unemployed. This figure was down from 10.1 percent in April.

"There are people that took much lesser skilled positions and had a really hard time finding the work that they may have been laid off from doing," said Jack Cullen, executive vice president and president, information technology, at staffing firms Modis and Ajilon Consulting.

While acknowledging the labor issues some tech workers face, Cullen also noted that job seekers will see increased career opportunities in the coming months.

The industry has "rebounded pretty aggressively from the early third quarter of last year," he said, adding that infrastructure upgrades and a focus on portability mean companies will hire network administrators and mobile developers. "Throughout the course of the year I think we're going to be getting some of the backlog off of the shelves and companies are going to start investing in things they need to do."

Professionals trying to reenter the tech sector can take certain steps to help improve the prospects for matching their skills to the available positions.