While most of the US job market still appears to be stagnating, opportunities in the IT sector are rapidly expanding, as more tech jobs have been created in the past three and a half years since the end of the Great Recession than during the same recovery timelines following the dot-com bubble burst and the early-1990s recession, according to the latest report from online IT career specialist Dice.
The report also shows that the unemployment rate among technology professionals is now half that of national average, with especially low unemployment rates for database administrators and network architects. The unemployment rate for technology professionals steadied in the fourth quarter at 3.3 percent, less than half the national average.
The largest component of those job gains is technology consulting, which added another 21,100 positions in the fourth quarter of 2012 for a total of 80,500 positions for the full year, according to the report.
Overall, since the most recent recession officially ended in June 2009, the report shows that 180,600 tech jobs have been created. In the same time frame following the recession in March 1991, the overall number of U.S. tech jobs dropped by 48,500.
"The 2001 tech bubble" recession was by far the most severe for technology professionals. "Even today, with the strong jobs creation, the tech workforce (as defined by those three categories in the BLS) is smaller at 2,976,500 people than its peak of 3,526,000 professionals, which occurred in March of 2001," Dice said.
Demand for developers remains strong, with the hiring of Java/J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) developers at the top of the priority list, with more than one in five of the 77,000 jobs posted on Dice containing some mention of the need for Java expertise.
Demand for mobile developers is also strong as more companies seek out different ways to interact with their consumers and most users do much of their business from either a smartphone or a tablet.
"With smartphones, [Apple] iOS, [Google] Android devices and apps on a fast upward trajectory, mobile development skills should continue to see skyrocketing demand as we move toward mid-decade," report author and Dice Managing Director Alice Hill wrote. "In a marketplace where talent is the ultimate desirable, finding, hiring, keeping and evolving that talent often can make or break an organization."
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