IT market remains strong

Westchester County Business Journal, Jan 21, 2008 by Golden, John

An economic analyst who prepared the latest report on the information technology job market in Westchester County said the IT sector is still "relatively recession-proof" despite a dip in hiring here in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Though overall demand for technology-savvy workers remains quite steady, cautious employers are hiring the "jack-of-all-trades" to fill their short-term needs rather than more expert computer specialists as a hedge against a recession this year, said Farrokh Z. Hormozi, the Pace University professor who tracks quarterly hiring trends in Westchester and Manhattan in the Pace/SkillPROOF IT Index (PSII) Report.

Hormozi attributed a 24-point drop in the index of Westchester IT job openings - from 123 points in the third quarter to 99 in the last three months of 2007 - to the credit crunch brought on by the subprime mortgage market collapse and a fourth-quarter labor market that is historically slow. The fourth-quarter IT market was down 4 points from the same period a year ago.

However, of 11 separate job categories tracked in the quarterly index, only five showed slight or marked declines in demand - research computer scientists, IT managers, programmers, software applications engineers and network systems and data communications analysts. Three categories rose slightly or stayed relatively flat - systems analysts, database administrators and software systems engineers. Openings for computer specialists showed the fastest growth, up 16 points from the fourth quarter, while demand for network administrators rose two points. In the "other specialists" category, job openings rose three points.

That latter computer professional is the "jack-of-all-trades," Hormozi said. Fearing a recession, companies don't want to limit themselves by hiring very specialized IT workers. As a result, "Demand for these guys is shooting up rapidly. They can do a little bit of programming. They can do a little bit of management. They can do a little bit of software engineering. They can do a little bit of hardware engineering. These guys would satisfy the needs of these companies in the short run. The companies are waiting to see what's going to happen to the economy as a whole."

"Since I wrote that report," said Hormozi, a professor in Pace's department of public administration, "recession has been moreand more prominent" a subject. "I hope that I was right in saying recession was a minimal expectation."

In Manhattan, the fourth-quarter IT market fared worse than in Westchester, dropping 33 index points, from 127 in the third quarter to 94. Of the 11 job categories tracked, only research computer scientists showed an increase in demand.

Despite the fourth-quarter decline in the metropolitan area, Hormozi said the overall market for the IT sector is relatively stable and, judging from historical trend lines, has a healthy future. He expects the labor market for IT specialists to grow this year.

"Technology is still really kind of new and companies need these specialists," he said. "My outlook for the future is very positive."

That growth, according to Pace/SkillPROOF analysts, will be driven in part by fast-rising demand for experts in virtualization, a new technology that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same computer, and in Ajax, a programming technique to make Web pages more interactive. In 2007, demand for specialists skilled in Ajax rose 50 percent in the metropolitan area, they said.

At Pace University's Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems on the Pleasantville campus, "We see a tremendous amount of interest in people with computer security, information security, network security, computer forensics" skills sought by employers, Dean Susan M. Merritt said. The school, as a designated National Center in Information Assurance Education, offers numerous security-related programs for both undergraduates and graduate students. "And we continue to see students being sought after and hired in all areas, including software development and engineering, open software applications, web development, database management, systems architecture and project management," she said.