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U.S. Tech Jobs Back on Track
by Investor's Business Daily (03/30/06) P. A6; Howell, Donna

  The aftermath of the tech bust and the phenomenon of offshoring caused many U.S. IT jobs to disappear, though in recent years the situation has brightened for U.S. workers. With several studies identifying sustained growth and interest in computer science among college students falling off, the industry could actually experience a worker shortage. A recent Robert Half survey found that 12 percent of companies plan to increase their IT workforces in the second quarter of this year, compared to just 4 percent that plan cuts. "Companies have hired in finance, information technology, administration, sales--you name it--over the last six months to a year," leading to a greater demand for IT workers, said Robert Half's Jeff Markham. That demand is particularly strong in the retail sector, where companies are investing, or, in some cases, re-investing, in technology for customer relationship management and business intelligence to enhance customer contact, efficiency, and to better understand buying patterns. Security, enterprise resource planning, and health care are also hot fields for IT workers, according to the placement company Yoh. ACM reports that the approximately 2 percent to 3 percent job loss rate in IT due to offshoring is much smaller than the rate of job loss and creation within the United States, and that tech jobs should stay strong in the areas where they have historically been healthy. The telecom bust, driven by massive over-extension leading up to Y2K, combined with the dot-com collapse to constrict the supply of jobs, according to Moshe Vardi, co-chair of the ACM study and a computer science professor at Rice University. "We essentially had the perfect storm in terms of jobs -- and then there were job losses," he said. "We found IT turned around by late 2002." Still, Vardi said the proportion of college freshman planning to study computer science dropped from about 4 percent in 2000 to 1.5 percent in 2004, because the tech crash caused so many to lose faith in the stability of IT. The ACM Globalization and Offshoring of Software Report is available at www.acm.org/globalizationreport/