U.S. Jobs Report For October Shows Another Strong Month For IT Services And Software, CompTIA Analysis Finds

4,200 jobs added last month; net gain of 56,800 this year

Employment in the country’s Information technology (IT) sector increased by 4,200 jobs in October, the fourth straight month of growth, according to the IT Employment Tracker released recently by CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the technology industry.

As it has throughout 2016, the software and services category paced IT sector job growth, adding 8,300 positions last month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation report (#jobsreport) released this morning. For the year, this category is up 73,500 jobs.

“The reasonably solid jobs report is an indication that IT sector and IT occupation employment remain on track with year-end growth targets,” said Tim Herbert, senior vice president, research and market intelligence, for CompTIA.

“Despite angst over next week’s election, employers added tech jobs, a reflection of continuing demand for digital business technologies, managed IT services, cybersecurity expertise, and related skills,” he added.

October job growth was also reported in the categories of other information services, including search portals (up 1,200) and data processing, hosting and related services (up 200).

Offsetting last month’s gains were declines in telecommunications employment (down 4,500 jobs) and computer and electronics manufacturing (down 1,000).

The net result for October: a gain of 4,200 jobs. Through the first 10 months of 2016 the IT sector has added a net 56,800 new jobs.

The second component of the nation’s IT workforce – IT occupations across all other industries – bounced back somewhat in October, with an estimated net gain of 69,000 jobs. For the calendar year, IT occupations show an estimated net gain of more than 86,000 jobs.

The CompTIA IT Employment Tracker report is available at http://www.slideshare.net/comptia/comptia-it-employment-tracker-november-2016.

For more CompTIA research on technology employment, skills and workforce trends visit https://www.comptia.org/insight-tools/business?tags=it%20workforce.