Hiring Woes
Our Clients are still hiring and today I was reminded of one reason why: Unemployment for IT workers has fallen to an all-time low according to CIO Insight analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
My friend, J. R., forwarded me an article titled, Damn the Economy! IT Employment Rises to New Heights by Eric Chabrow in CIO Insight magazine. While overall unemployment creeps forward, joblessness among business-tech pros reaches a record low. When the government started tracking IT unemployment in 2000 the rate was 2.2%. Last year joblessness among American IT workers averaged 2.1 percent last year down from 2.5 percent in 2006.
Overall U.S. job growth in 2007 inched forward 1.1 percent, compared with the 8.5 percent gain within the IT ranks.
What does this mean for leaders? I think you know the answer.
- Hire carefully rather than desperately. Make sure you get the right people on board in the first place.
- Manage systematically so you are consistently fully in gauging your people based on their natural strengths behaviorally and most passionate values.
- Reward and recognize people based on achieving results regularly.
- Meet with people one-on-one on a regular basis to confirm they are enjoying their work and plan to continue with your firm. Listen carefully to concerns and respond promptly and comprehensively.
- Make certain your people understand they’re doing meaningful work.
The article further reports: “Of the eight IT occupations classified by the government—managers, computer scientists/systems analysts, computer programmers, computer software engineers, computer support specialists, database administrators, network/computer systems administrators and network systems/data communications analysts—only one saw a decline in the number of employed. That occupation, computer programmers, employed 526,000 people last year, a loss of 6.4 percent.
“As fewer companies develop custom systems combined with the increased use of offshoring for coding applications, the ranks of employed programmers in the U.S. has plunged by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the decade. Yet, the need to fill the coding jobs that remain in U.S. offices continues to be strong, as reflected the relatively low 2.2 percent unemployment rate among computer programmers.“
