Posted on 09/18/2003 4:03:48 PM PDT by Mini-14
About 150,000 IT positions were lost in 2001 and 2002
SEPTEMBER 17, 2003
The study, which was presented at a congressional forum today by the Washington-based nonprofit group Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST), affirms what IT managers have seen in response to help-wanted ads. "I'm sure the number is 6% or higher," said Michael Russo, a data center manager at Wyeth, a Madison, N.J.-based pharmaceuticals giant.
A recent third-shift job in the company's operational data center drew 168 applicants. "There are a lot of people who are out of work," Russo said.
Randy Rosenthal, manager of computer operations at Southwest Securities Group Inc. in Dallas, has seen the same trend: highly qualified people with multiple degrees applying for jobs IT managers once had trouble filling. "That tells me that 6% has hit the IT area pretty hard," he said.
About 150,000 IT positions were lost in 2001 and 2002, about two-thirds of them in programming, the report said.
Two years ago, Phoenix-based water and electric utility Salt River Project had an open position for an operations analyst and received about 15 applications; last year, it posted a similar position and had 50 applicants. This year the 800,000-customer utility has a hiring freeze, said operations manager Dewayne Nelsen.
There was a sense of grim resignation about the latest report among some IT managers at a conference held here by AFCOM, an Orange, Calif.-based data center managers user group.
Several IT managers, some requesting that their names not be used, told of data center consolidations that led to layoffs or offshore plans. For the future, automation improvements and the development of "self-healing" applications will also hurt some IT career paths. The career advice from one IT manager was to avoid the technical aspects of the profession and focus more on IT management training.
IT unemployment rates were as low as 1.2% in 1997, shooting up to 4.3% in 2002.
But the overall number of IT jobs has seen remarkable growth, tripling in the past 20 years, according to the CPST, which conducts labor force and educational research for a range of scientific organizations and companies. The IT labor force grew from 719,000 jobs in 1983 to 2.5 million at its peak in 2000.
With the growth of IT came an increasing reliance upon foreign workers. This increase was facilitated by legislation expanding the use of H-1B visas, which allow skilled foreign workers to take jobs in the U.S. for up to six years. A cap of 195,000 on the number of visas that can be issued has been in place for each of the past three years, but the cap will drop to 65,000 on Oct. 1. L-1 visas, which allow companies to transfer foreign employees into the U.S., have tripled in use.
The report, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York and the United Engineering Foundation, an umbrella organization for engineering groups, draws no firm conclusion on the offshore outsourcing trend. But it recognizes predictions made by analyst firms, including Gartner Inc., which in July estimated that 10% of all U.S. professional jobs in IT services companies would be transferred overseas, along with 5% of IT positions in other businesses.
Long term, the report says more research is needed on the effects of offshore outsourcing and the workforce issues raised by it: "Can the U.S. continue to be a prime market for the rest of the world if it is a stronghold for neither manufacturing nor technical services?" the report asks. "What are the long-run implications of these trends for American standards of living?"
The CPST report concludes that while the job market for IT professionals has weakened, it remains sizable.
"For the near run, normal turnover alone will generate opportunities for people who are determined to work in the field," the report said. "The long-run outlook is more problematic. The United States does not lack, either now or in the foreseeable future, sufficient numbers of capable people who would like to work in IT. But those people may not be willing to conclude that long-run demands for their services will be good enough to support IT as a sensible career choice."
Now those people try to get real jobs and they find they don't have the skills or experience - they just got worked to the bone and dropped went their company stock tanked. "But I'm an IT professional...." so are lots of other folks with solid credentials. It's competitive out there nowadays.
The biggest fools were the investors who thought they were tech-savvy, but we all paid the price.
Sounds like you weathered the storm.
Hmmmm....it seems that companies are trying to "be savvy" by outsourcing, as it is the newest pointy haired trend. It will be highly satisfying to see these same companies starve.
Sounds like you weathered the storm.
*sigh*, Oh, I avoided the worst of it, basically because I am so damned OLD, and have seen booms and busts before, but a couple of my 401(k) funds were invested more heavily in dot.bombs than I realized, and got "adjusted" to the extent that I can pretty much forget a traditional retirement. Ah well, I don't fish and I am bad at golf.
But I feel I am truly blessed for this reason: I love my work. (What if I _hated_ it and was in this position?!!)
"Paging Doctor Kevorkian!"
6%. HA! Last week the sunday paper had exactly two (2) IT jobs in the paper. 5-6 years ago there was about 800 - 1,000 listings.
Of course, back then the Apartment communities near the IT corridor up US-75 didn't have the scent of curie wafting through the air everyday. Shame it can't go back to steaks and the game. The money stayed in the neighborhood. I guess somebody figured Western Union was making too much money sending the pay back. So they just offshored all the jobs. Ya ought to hear the customers calling in nowadays cussin the "support" they get from "Name Brand Computing." First words out of their mouths? "Thanks God you speak real english!" Sad.
And certainly we are all subject to the business cycle; and we are more vulnerable to that cycle when it is distorted by events like the technology bubble of the late 90s - an abnormally higher flight often guarantees an abnormally deeper decent.
My own place in IT is much earlier than the implementation and operation/maintenance described in most of the preceding posts. I'm a business process analyst and work across multiple technologies, creating or redesigning business processes and writing the requirements for enabling technology. One of my most valuable skills is a command of the English language. I know what things mean and can clearly interpret what folks want and need in a new process and system. I've had my share of unemployment too but am doing well as an independent consultant right now.
Haha! Yes! My town had some full-time employees on the payroll into 2002 for the "Y2K" problem!!!
Must have been someone's relatives. Can you imagine printing that in a town report?
I think the term I.T. is misunderstood. As it turns out the better word to use is Engineering. In general it is the engineering profession which is being gutted in this nation. That includes many technologies. While it is valid to say that one should "get out" of this profession in this country because of the lack of jobs it is not valid to say that engineers are not a vital part of the future or that the jobs do not and will exist.
My clients are increasingly proving to be knuckleberries who gutted their IT staff and commenced to slapping together a hundred queries that sieze up their pcs and I have to laugh as these Frankenstein.mdb's could have beem easily avoided by a couple of well placed VBA functions.
Pointy haired idiots with no real idea as to the limitations of SQL, playing stupid data mining games...
That's about when my phone rings and I commence to milk them.
Be the outsource.
Revenge, dish, cold, life is good.
Which Sunday paper was this?
Good analogy!
An Albanian credit scam where you only got paid in VIRTUAL money, which could be exchanged for certain items. The children of these scams are with us today in the form of sites where you earn credits for reading banner ads and turn them in for prizes when you have enough credits accrued. Problem is, to buy a $5.00 item, it costs like 100,000 credits and hundreds of hours of ad viewing a month.
Yes it was a shameful period, most shameful because the public really must have thought it was real. I never realized how few people must really have thought it could last forever. It wasn't real. It was credit based. The employees paychecks were being charged to the company credit accounts in a very real way. The more valuation the company got from the bank, the more they were worth on the Stock Market. The more they were worth on the Stock Market, the more their stock were worth, and stocks were being bought with credit. The more the Stock was worth, the more credit was awarded to the companies by banks.
Yes there ARE still a lot of IT jobs out there. There will always BE IT jobs as long as idiots use computers. There just aren't and won't be as many EVEN if we get another PT Barnum in office who finds a way to create another tech bubble - because the next artificial bubble will most likely be in a different area.
Did that too. What a fraud much of that work was, especially the embedded systems work. Because something had a processor that had a date function we scared them into believing that could be a vulnerability. Most of the time the chip in the automatic door or the alarm system didn't set the date or use the date. In fact, most of the time we could not know what the date was that was currently in the chip. We did our best though.
He publically and frequently took credit for it. He still publically and frequently takes credit for it. In fact, the media still gives him credit for it. Besides, he profited from it with campaign donations from those companies that prifited most. He did encouraged legislation which encouraged those companies to continue to do what they were doing SO he could take all the credit for it. He wants all the credit for it.
I'll give him what he wants in this case: all the credit for it.
If you took credit for it, this wouldn't make it any more true.
Your argument is this: because he lied (surpise!), it must be true. Need I tell you that this is illogical?
More importantly, people in this country are amazingly ignorant on this issue: after centuries of experience, most still think that presidents have anything to do with economy. This one went even farther, assuming a president's actions can durably influence the stock prices. Silly.
I do agree communication skills are a premium, but oft overlooked asset!
That's key. If you love what you do, you'll never work another day :^)
H-1B Visas, Schmate-1B Visas!
They can't take all the the jobs away from us native Americans. We can always go flip hamburgers for a living. Oh, wait a minute, the illegal aliens are already doing that!
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