The Size of the IT Job Market

Comparing the U.S. IT job markets of the 1990s and 2000s.

Jobs are disappearing” and “steady erosion of IT jobs to global outsourcing” are recent themes in the media, presenting a grim outlook for IT jobs in the U.S. This underscores the importance of systematic study of the IT job market in an environment of global outsourcing [ 3]. Many observers feel the effect of outsourcing has been to reduce the number of IT jobs in the U.S. One approach to assess the relative effects of factors, such as outsourcing, is to study the relative size of the job market for IT personnel before the advent of global outsourcing and then compare it with the current conditions of plentiful global outsourcing.

Starting in the early 1990s, researchers have systematically sampled job advertisements. Objectives of this research stream were to determine what skills were most in demand for IT professionals, and any data presented on

the size of the job markets was merely a by-product. Similarly, newspaper advertising was assessed in a longitudinal format during much of the 1990s. With the growing popularity of Internet job sites, sampling of job advertisements switched to the Internet in order to offer a longitudinal base for appraising the relative size and direction of the current job market. Current objectives are to appraise the strength and direction of today’s IT job market as compared to that of the last decade and to the tumultuous early part of this decade. Continuity is achieved through consistency of the geographic locations sampled. The cities or metro areas included in the current study are those sampled in the 1990s. Early findings from this study were presented at the ACM SIGMIS/CPR conference with 2005 data [ 2]. This column updates the data and poses the questions: How does the

IT job market of this decade compare to that of the previous decade, and Are there trends in the job market of the previous decade that may hold lessons for the near future?

DATA COLLECTION Data collection in the 1990s was based on newspaper job ads. The major newspaper in each of the selected cities was analyzed once a year. This was a laborious, manual classification task that was aided by the development of a job skill classification taxonomy. This taxonomy was revised several times as popular job skills changed. Another major change was a switch to Internet-based job sites. After some time was spent studying the relative accuracy and effectiveness of competing job sites, the Monster.com site was selected as the research site, as it is one of the most popular job sites for IT jobs and lends itself well to sys-