Stronger hiring expectations in the first quarter of 2005
According to a report by IT staffing and consulting firm, Robert Half Technology, Business expansion is translating into projections of stepped-up IT hiring in the first quarter of 2005.Demand for IT workers is especially high in the West Coast region and a four-state region around Texas.
Robert Half's national survey of 1,400 CIOs at companies with at least 100 employees shows that a net of 9% of the executives surveyed plan to add IT staff in the first quarter. (The net 9% increase reflects that 11% of CIOs plan to add staff but 2% anticipate IT staff reductions.) That compares with a 6% net increase in the current quarter and only a 3% net increase in the first quarter of 2004.
The increased hiring plans for 2005 reflect improved, yet cautious, optimism. Companies overall are adding staff slowly because they aren't willing to risk layoffs if they expand IT teams too aggressively, according to Robert Half Technology.
Ryan Gilmore, branch manager for Robert Half Technology's Silicon Valley office in San Jose, Calif. says he's cautiously optimistic that the IT job market is recovering. "After what we went through over the last few years, tough times, it's good to see the Valley recovering," he says. "It's always difficult to predict the future, but my gut feeling is that 2005 will be a good year and that hiring is on the rebound."
Larger companies, those with 1,000 or more employees, have the strongest hiring plans, as do companies in two key regions. A net 15% of CIOs in Pacific-region states, which includes Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, expect to increase IT hiring in the first quarter, as do a net increase of 12% of CIOs in the West-South-Central region (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas).
IT workers with certain key skills are most in demand. Those include IT employees with expertise in Windows and NT systems administration, Checkpoint firewall management, wireless network management, and Cisco Systems network administration. Also eagerly sought are workers with Microsoft .Net development skills, experience with IT technologies related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and skills in a longtime favorite--security.
According to a new hiring survey by Manpower Inc, American companies plan to hire slightly more employees in the first three months of 2005 than they did a year ago, especially in finance, insurance and real estate,.
Twenty-four percent of 16,000 U.S. employers surveyed said they plan to increase overall hiring from January to March 2005, compared to 20 percent who said that in the first quarter of 2004, according to the quarterly report released by Manpower Inc.
Still, hiring in the first quarter of 2005 was expected to be about the same as in the last quarter of 2004. "I don't think we will see more robustness in the labor market," said Jeff Joerres, chairman and chief executive officer of Manpower, a global staffing company based in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale. "We're just going to see a steady appetite of companies to hire people."
Hiring in manufacturing, and the finance, insurance and real estate sector was expected to be among the strongest of the 10 industries surveyed, Manpower reported. Finance, insurance and real estate companies haven't been as confident in their job forecasts in about 25years, Manpower reported.
Joerres said those industries had trimmed a fair number of jobs in 2001and 2002, but was now resetting itself. There is also greater demand for products with a stronger economy. "It's kind of a proxy for all of the other areas," he said. About 28 percent of businesses in the durable-goods manufacturing sector said they expect to add jobs in the first quarter.
"That will be one (area) to watch as interest rates go up," Joerres said. Government officials report the national economy added a net 112,000jobs in November, considerably fewer jobs than analysts had expected and a deceleration from the 303,000 positions added in October.
The Manpower survey found that one in 10 companies expected to cut employees, 59 percent don't plan to change their staffing levels and seven percent were unsure of their plans. Ernie Goss, an economics professor at Creighton University, in Omaha, Neb., said demand for American products abroad has increased because of the lower dollar, especially compared to the euro. "Your products are cheaper so they end up buying more of your products and you then hire more people to make those products," he said.
Hiring prospects in the Northeast and West remain the same as in the previous quarter, while employers in the South plan a slight increase in jobs and those in the Midwest a slight decrease.
But Manpower said generally, job prospects for the first quarter of 2005 are stronger than a year ago in all sectors.
Source
- Associated Press
- InformationWeek